Why won't it? I think user accounts need federation as well, but switching hosts isn't hard. Lemmy.ca went down a little while ago due to a power supply breaking. The admin has been great about it, moving away from the provider that took a day to fix the issue. But during the downtime I was able to use an account I has already set up on a different instance.

When reddit is down, it was really down. When a lemmy instance is down you can just use another. Don't get tied into just one host.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It’s easy to say “don’t get tied down”, but people do. People like their online personas, their handles, their comment and post history. It’s a mixture of sunk-cost fallacy and FOMO. Reddit knows this, it’s why they still have 2000x as many monthly users as Lemmy.

This will be the same here: if a billionaire buys the biggest instance, yeah cool everyone can defederate, but then all the historical content is gone, most of the users are gone unless they move to you or an instance still federated to you, and you essentially alienate yourself.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That's why mastodon pushed for account migration features. They made a bunch of them.

There is also bluesky that made their own protocol to handle identities diffretly than ActivityPub.

There is just not enough devs to code that stuff in Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Mastodon still doesn't allow account import

Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations, but your archive can be viewed by any software that understands how to parse Activity Streams 2.0 documents.

Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations. There is also a 30 day cooldown period in which you cannot migrate again, so be very careful before using this option!

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's not that easy to implement. Any feature that lets you import posts would just be a bypass for any kind of spam protection or rate limit. You could just "import" thousands of spam posts at a time, without the server being able to prevent it, because it seems totally legitimate.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

should def strive for it for lemmy aswell.

can’t find much info on the subject on github for it unfortunate

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/account-migration/3058

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985