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?
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.
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
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.