this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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Don't Lemmy and Mastodon also have this problem to some extent? Like, all the comms on lemm.ee will have to start over on new instances, no? Is it possible to migrate all subscribers, comments, and posts? Or just partial migrations?
As Lemmy is federated but not fully decentralised, continuation of communities hosted on a dead instance is not currently possible. (Compare this to Matrix, where a room can carry on even if its original homeserver dies, so long as at least one other homeserver participates in it.)
So that is indeed still a problem here, although not as severe, because I think the posts in those communities will still be available on instances that participated in them. Such communities would be forever frozen, though; carrying on from where they left off would require migrating to (or creating) communities on still-running instances.
Lemmy does allow you to export your own data and import it into another instance. That includes settings, subscriptions, and links to saved posts/comments. So I guess maybe you could save your own posts, export your data, and import it elsewhere to keep links to what you wrote on the dying instance. I have not tested this to be sure.
They don’t have nearly as much of a problem as non-federated social media. The short answer is that it depends on how instances have things set up and how users decide to migrate- but still, compare that to non-federated social media where you’re just given the boot when things shut down