I would really love if this became an option, since I’m planning on making my own instance. I’d like to keep my subscriptions, posts, comments and bookmarks and migrating would be something great. What do you think?
To keep posts, comments is unlikely to happen. Transferring the sub list and bookmarks or just exporting them should be in the near future, at least with 3rd party apps.
See the Lemmy blog:
At the same time, we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout
you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
This is the feature in question:
Moving user profile to a new instance #1985: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985
God I love FOSS, I contributed with a very tiny feature but it made me feel so good knowing I contributed to a beautiful, community owned, project
Do you mind sharing details about what and how you contributed? Genuinely curious.
So I’m wondering if a DIY middle ground can be reached with the API and some scripting, perhaps even just in the browser after entering your credentials.
You won’t be able to move your posts, but you could link to your old profile in your bio.
But I can see it being viable to basically download your old subscriptions and bookmarks and basically applying them to your new account.
I’m wondering if a DIY middle ground can be reached with the API and some scripting
There is a script somewhere which allows people to export/import their subscriptions. It did not work for me, hence I did not save it. But in theory, workarounds should be possible.
You won’t be able to move your posts, but you could link to your old profile in your bio.
You can already do that, or do I get you wrong? Probably does not help when your old instance ceases to exist.
There’s already a tool for moving over the subscriptions: https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
Hey OP, just letting you know I just released a tool that does this. It’s alpha, and only supports Lemmy BE 0.18.1-rc9 (and above), but if your source and destination meet that criteria, you can give it a whirl: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Right now, yes - I know that’s unfortunate since we still have many instances on 0.18.0, but I’m hoping they will all move up to 0.18.1 once that is officially released, which should be soon.
Supporting multiple versions of the API would be really difficult right now with it changing so often, but the hope is that in the future you can at least use an older version of LASIM to download from an older lemmy instance, then take that profile file and upload it with a newer version of LASIM to a newer instance.
FYI, this is more like r/AskReddit where you ask people of Lemmy, not to ask about Lemmy. This would probably be better suited for !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
