this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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Lemmy Administration

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I'm curious if I can migrate my instance (a single user) to a different domain? Right now I'm on a free DNS from no-ip but I might get a prettier paid domain name sometime.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

It can cause some wackiness... basically you will need to maintain that old domain forever and everything will still refer to that old domain.

For example, your post looks like this from an ActivityPub/federation perspective:

{
    [...]
    "id": "https://atosoul.zapto.org/post/24325",
    "attributedTo": "https://atosoul.zapto.org/u/Soullioness",
    [...]
    "content": "<p>I'm curious if I can migrate my instance (a single user) to a different domain? Right now I'm on a free DNS from no-ip but I might get a prettier paid domain name sometime.</p>\n",
}

The post itself has an ID that references your domain, and the the attributedTo points to your user which also references your domain. AFAIK there is no reasonable way to update/change this. IDs are forever.

It would also break all of the subscriptions for an existing instance, as the subscriptions are all set to deliver to that old domain.

IMO your best bet would be to start a new instance on the new domain, update your profile on the old one saying that your user is now @[email protected] and maintain that old server in a read-only manner for as long as you can bear.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a great explanation! Thank you. If I were to make a new instance, could I transfer users to the new instance so subscriptions aren't lost?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know that is an often discussed and requested feature, but as of right now there is no import/export as far as I am aware.

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

i don't think that that would be too difficult to implement

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