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 remembered and tracked down this comment made by Matthew on HN 4 months ago - I’ve been trying to pay attention to pain points that prevent my friends from trying out federated services. He seems to acknowledge the issue / distinction between discord’s voice channels and what matrix is lacking:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28435893

And further down:

Thanks all for the responses - the whole “matrix doesn’t have voice channels” thing is much clearer now: it’s not the hard bit (voice/video conferencing!) but just the UX of how it’s hooked up. This we can fix :)

I’m not sure if there is anything more recent about it though.

This is a random idea, but what if instance admins could subscribe to another or multiple other instances block lists? It might be a useful mechanism to reduce duplicate work. Smaller instance admins could subscribe to larger instance block lists to share the moderation burden.

As long as the app doesn’t require google play services then yep. I use apk extractor by meher on the play store. I’ve used it to transfer a few apps I paid for to a non-connected device and it worked.

I like this extension which works with a handful of big news sites: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome - there’s a firefox build there too