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Moving communities between instances

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Moving a Lemmy community to PieFed

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
    !whatever@piefed.social.

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30 comments

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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

        • 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.

    • 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

    • 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. :)

30 comments