When the admin of a instance wants to stop the server (for example costs are running too high) but your communities are active and you don’t want them to die along with it, is it possible to migrate the communities to another instance?
When the admin of a instance wants to stop the server (for example costs are running too high) but your communities are active and you don’t want them to die along with it, is it possible to migrate the communities to another instance?
There is a big difference to posting to your home instance (with rules you agreed to and admins you trust) + having some content temporarily cached on other instances to lower the server load Vs. migrating a community including all its content to a totally different service with different rules, owners and monetization strategies.
There is also a big difference between having the service that you agreed to host your content archiving it and 3rd parties scraping content for archiving or other purposes. The latter can’t be prevented on the public web, but it really isn’t the same at all.
Edit: Archiving content (as important as it can sometimes be), should really be opt-in. The problem you describe is mainly because so much content these days is hosted by bad-actors that only try to monetize and exploit their users and only under that framework does scraping those bad actors without permission for archiving purposes sound like the morally right thing to do. What we are trying here is to get away from these bad actors and actually respect human beings in their choices, what ever those might be.
I understand why you say those things have big differences, but when one tries to articulate those differences in a legal and policy framework that allows the things one wants but not the things one doesn’t want, I think the lines separating the differences becomes grayer and grayer until they are in danger of disappearing altogether. I personally am in support of tooling to migrate communities, policies that allow it under appropriate circumstances, and a culture that embraces it “when necessary”. The details of appropriateness and necessity are complicated, but for me there’s a bright line well short of “ask everyone before preserving anything” where preservation/migration projects are allowable.
But I don’t have a lot more to say about this in the absence of a concrete real world context. If the fediverse continues to thrive, I’m sure we’ll see those contexts arise at some point and can discuss how people are viewing the situation and whether they’re able to encode those views into rules and enforce them. It will be interesting to see develop.
Edit: Your edit came in as my post was landing. I couldn’t disagree more that archiving should be opt-in. The most important preservation is the preservation of content that someone wants to destroy. And bad actors cannot be avoided, rather it’s bad actions that must be limited… through the consistent application of good policy equally to people whose intent you trust and people whose intent you distrust.