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Comment by matricaria | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the problem. The Fediverse already solved this. I can log into my Lemmy instance from any Lemmy app, same with Mastodon. There are also PWAs that do this.

Yes, I can’t log in from another instance’s website/frontend, but does it really matter?

The real problem is that my identity/account is coupled to the instance. If the instance disappears, so does my account and I lose everything.

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There is another problem. Instances are already fracturing and forming tight ideological bubbles. See Beehaw. This means that to access all federated content, one will need to have many accounts on many instances. This is really poor UX.

I don't think this is a huge problem. You just have to pick an instance that matches your values. I deleted my account on Beehaw as I don't want that much moderation. Others might want it.

Sure this could lead to echo chambers/filter bubbles, but that is already the case on every platform. I think most people actually want it that way.

I thought Beehaw aligned with my values. Turns out I was wrong. Many of us discovered we were wrong. Beehaw didn’t announce at the beginning their intent to do this. The owner changed their mind at some point and significantly altered the experience for everyone. This is the risk: the capriciousness of the instance owner.

This is compounded by the fact that defederation goes both ways. I can’t find an instance which hasn’t blocked at least some other instances. So no matter what, if I want to have access to everything (until such time as I decide to block it), I have to sign up to multiple instances. I also have to regularly check what the owners might have blocked in case I need to sign up for other instances.

I tried really hard to like it, but all in all, Lemmy has been a crappy experience.

After a quick internet search I found some straight forward tutorials about moving instances.

So you don't loose followers/follows but can't move posts (but they are kept alive as long as the old instance is active). That is IMO not that bad at all.

Maybe it is just a matter of time we get full account moving, I don't see why that would be technically impossible to do.

You really can, and the ways to do it are "theorized" by the OP's blog post.

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/a/170880

tl;dr

For this answer, let's consider an example where:

You want to subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/cryptography Your local instance is https://lemmy.ca

Either search in lemmy.ml for https://lemmy.ml/c/cryptography or search in lemmy.ml for !cryptography@lemmy.ml or go to https://lemmy.ca/c/cryptography@lemmy.ml

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