My main thinking here, is that the main reason to migrate a community anyway, is because an instance goes down. But once that instance is down, its impossible to migrate it securely anyway… otherwise communities could be easily hijacked.
I think it’s ok to require the original instance to be online, an insecure migration should just be telling people to follow a different path imo. I think giving communities a low friction way to be nomadic would ease concerns about deciding between self hosting and using existing instances. Users could perhaps be presented with a popover to communicate the change and maybe have an archived link to the old community path. It would also be cool if you could initiate a migration using just backed up config secrets in a new instance.
I understand doubts, especially if there is a lot of work to do I think it is right to ask as many questions as possible.
Personally I think of at least two other reasons for changing the instance:
the first is a possible problem with the moderators / admin. For example in case they did questionable operations.
The second concerns me more personally: I opened a community here because there are no Italian instances. It took me a few months to convince people to sign up here, it would be ironic to tell them “no, now re-sign up somewhere else”.
Since in this thread we talked about how to invite people to subscribe and / or how to create more instances for me this is one of the reasons that pushes me not to try.
In the meantime, thanks for the discussion and listening
My main thinking here, is that the main reason to migrate a community anyway, is because an instance goes down. But once that instance is down, its impossible to migrate it securely anyway… otherwise communities could be easily hijacked.
I think it’s ok to require the original instance to be online, an insecure migration should just be telling people to follow a different path imo. I think giving communities a low friction way to be nomadic would ease concerns about deciding between self hosting and using existing instances. Users could perhaps be presented with a popover to communicate the change and maybe have an archived link to the old community path. It would also be cool if you could initiate a migration using just backed up config secrets in a new instance.
I understand doubts, especially if there is a lot of work to do I think it is right to ask as many questions as possible.
Personally I think of at least two other reasons for changing the instance:
the first is a possible problem with the moderators / admin. For example in case they did questionable operations.
The second concerns me more personally: I opened a community here because there are no Italian instances. It took me a few months to convince people to sign up here, it would be ironic to tell them “no, now re-sign up somewhere else”.
Since in this thread we talked about how to invite people to subscribe and / or how to create more instances for me this is one of the reasons that pushes me not to try.
In the meantime, thanks for the discussion and listening