Moving a Lemmy community to PieFed
peertube.wtf
A quick demo of the process of moving a community between instances.

When a community needs to move to another instance, it can be a rocky process.

It doesn’t need to be, though - as long as someone on your instance has been a part of the community for a while your instance will already have quite a lot of the content from the old community. All we need to do is change our record of which instance the community belongs to and that’s what PieFed’s new ‘Move community’ feature does. Check out the video for a quick demo.

The full process is:

  1. Ensure the copy of the community on this instance has been active long enough to receive a decent amount of posts. The move process will not copy posts so having an account on this instance subscribed to it for a while is the only way to get old posts here.

  2. Lock the old community to by setting it to ‘moderators only’ so no one else can post in it.

  3. Create a post in the old community announcing the impending move to piefed.social. Paste the url of that post into the field below.

  4. Submit the ‘move community’ form (there is a link in the sidebar of every remote community) to send the request to piefed.social admins.

  5. piefed.social admins will review your request, turn this community into a local one and contact you.

  6. Update your announcement post in the old community to encourage people to join the new community at
    [email protected].

  • BentiGorlich@gehirneimer.de
    1·
    14 hours ago

    So what exactly does that do AP wise? Does it send out a MOVE activitiy of any kind? Do other instances get an activity by which they can tell that the community has moved and can they confirm that the new instance has the authority, so the permission, to move it from the old instance?

  • Rimu@piefed.socialOPEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    The process outlined above is “co-operative” in the sense that the moderators of the old community have decided to make the move and initiate the process themselves using their piefed.social accounts.

    But also anyone could choose to ‘fork’ the old community, with or without the old community mods involvement. The old community would not be locked and would continue as-is while the local copy of it would then be a separate community with all the old content in it. They would then diverge from that point onwards.

    I imagine there might sometimes be a need to reverse this process too, to re-associate a local community with it’s remote counterpart. Or to merge two communities…

  • experiencetheworld@feddit.org
    5·
    3 days ago

    Why not post it on PeerTube? We need more content there. Could have been a good and sneaky oppertunity to promote another fediverse product. Still a good and helpful video.

      • experiencetheworld@feddit.org
        4·
        3 days ago

        Of course it works but isn’t this community about the fediverse? I have the feeling that some of the fediverse services don’t get used enough to be useable, like PeerTube. Another point is when we are already in the ecosystem of the fediverse with beeing on Lemmy why should we post media ment for the fediverse outside from it? Isn’t the idea of fediverse to be an alternative to YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and the others? Don’t get me wrong here, my intention is not to criticize someone. I only thought it could be a good oppertunity to promote another fediverse service.

          • experiencetheworld@feddit.org
            2·
            3 days ago

            I don’t want to force my ideas on people, I like to share and chat about them but I feel if I upload it myself I would kind of force the idea. Also it is his video I think he should be in control of where it is posted.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
              2·
              3 days ago

              Really, as someone who regularly gets “you should give an archive.org link as well” when I post paywalled content, I really appreciate when people do provide additional links so that I can add them to the OP. It feels more like we are collaborating.

              • experiencetheworld@feddit.org
                1·
                2 days ago

                I get that point but I don’t say “you should” but rather “you could”. Also I think the example you give is a bit different because here we have someone (an individual) who took his time to create something which is different to other people sharing additional info.

                • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
                  1·
                  2 days ago

                  Rimu is already quite busy with the Piefed updates. He took the last resistance path to upload the video. If people want to promote Peertube in the process, they’re free to reupload the content.

                  Seems counterproductive to me to expect one person to do all the work instead of collaborating

  • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
    2·
    3 days ago

    It’s a cool feature, though as long as it’s Piefed-to-Piefed only it’s kind of of limited use. It also doesn’t transfer over subscriptions right? That’s still the biggest problem with community migration in my opinion.

    • Rimu@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      5·
      3 days ago

      It doesn’t do subscriptions. That would need to be initiated on the old community and currently all the old communities are on Lemmy instances, so that’s a non-starter.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
        2·
        3 days ago

        Could it be possible at some point in the future? Once we’ll have more Piefed instances people might want to move a few communities from one to another

        • Rimu@piefed.socialOPEnglish
          5·
          3 days ago

          Yes, for sure. I think the old community would Announce a Move activity to all followers, which would cause all the other instances to update their Follows to point to the new community.

    • Snoopy@piefed.socialMEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      It move a Lemmy’s community to PieFed.

      So for anyone who like PieFed’s features as

      • admin board, trusted instance
      • managing downvote per communities
      • tags
      • regrouping several communities
      • merging comment from a crosspost…

      it’s very handy. :)

      Once mobile support is there, I plan to migrate several of my Lemmy communities to PieFed and offer another experience to my readers. But of course, i will ask my readers first.

      So in fact, it’s open to all lemmy users. :)

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org
      2·
      3 days ago

      Piefed-to-Piefed only it’s kind of of limited use.

      On the other hand, it might drive people to Piefed more knowing they can transfer communities