This is kind of a question and conformation. Is there a way to backup a lemmy account from one instance and in case some thing happens, restore that user in another (with all the posts, likes, etc) ? I read that they were working on cross instance accounts , but is there a workaround meanwhile? Do we know the status of this implementation?
So far there is only (officially) the ability to export account settings, not the content itself.
Didn’t the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason – or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it’s been a few years…)
Lemmy is a small FOSS project ultimately, not a corporate entity. If anyone got penalized, it’d probably be the instance host owner at the end of the day. I’m sure they’d be willing to add this feature if someone added it for them, but they got plenty on their plate. If you desperately wanted to for some reason, you might be able to convince the instance owner to export your info from the DB lol, but it’s not even worth the effort.
I think it’s more about being prepared for potential attack using loads of GDPR requests that definitely can’t get processed manually even in 30 days. You know, just like we did with Reddit a few months ago.
Yeah, Lemmy and the GDPR is just an accident waiting to happen. I suppose somebody could just write a script to extract the requested information from the (PostgreSQL?) database. And share that script with other admins. But there are other parts of the GDPR that we also don’t pay any attention to.
The regulation does not apply to the processing of data by a person for a “purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity.” (Recital 18)
Considering most servers are run by volunteers, it’s unlikely the EU will try to enforce it.
However it would be nice to have the feature, and Mastodon does have the feature to export your data to ActivityPub format.
Is that working now, though? Last time I heard you can’t transfer messages between servers as well on Masto. Would be amazing if it’s possible now!
You can’t transfer but you can at least archive.
The issue I could see is ill-intentioned users importing a modified archive to alter the publication date to make it appear they posted something at a specific date in the past when they in fact didn’t.
This kind of functionality is something nostr does natively, but lemmy doesn’t really have a solution for this problem yet.
Lemmy 0.19.0 and higher have an export button in the web interface settings that’ll back up most of the stuff on your account. If your instance isn’t on that version yet, you’ll have to wait for the admins to upgrade.
I’m not sure if likes are transferred, as those are propagated across the network, but saved posts and comments should be, I think. In theory you could write a tool to download all data from your Lemmy account for earlier versions of Lemmy by using the API, but that’ll be much slower to generate.
If you’re an EU citizen, you could also demand a digitally readable data export of all your personal data from your instance admins through the rights granted to you under the GDPR and have them deal with it, but I don’t think you’ll make any friends by doing that.
Lemmy 0.19.0 and higher have an export button in the web interface settings that’ll back up most of the stuff on your account. If your instance isn’t on that version yet, you’ll have to wait for the admins to upgrade.
I used this to migrate my account from my old instance - it carries over your subscriptions, blocked communities, blocked users, saved posts, saved comments, display name, profile description, and theme applied 👌
Pretty much everything you’d want, except your own posts and your own comments, but those don’t matter to me too much.
People on lemmy.world (running lemmy 0.18.5) will need to use something else to migrate their account, like lasim: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Pretty much everything you’d want, except your own posts and your own comments, but those don’t matter to me too much.
In a perfect world, you could migrate all this content and keep your points and comments.
Unfortunately, this would be abused so hard. We would have people setting up private instances, faking their databases and creating accounts with a million Karma and huge comment histories. Then taking those personas and importing them onto legit instances.
This isn’t an issue with today’s Lemmy. But down the track if Lemmy is the size of Reddit, scammers and spammers would be doing this to, well scam and spam.
I wish we could just trust everyone. That sounds like a nicer world.