Given that Lemmy currently has no native support for migrating communities if an instance shuts down or becomes unstable, I’ve been wondering:

Has anyone thought about creating a bot that helps with this process?

The basic idea: when a migration is needed, one or more mods could create a new community on the target instance (setting up rules, banner, header, etc.), and then the bot would clone the old community’s content — posts, comments, etc. — and repost them to the new community (all with the community’s support, ideally preserving authorship, or noting who posted what).

To be respectful of users, there could even be an option to exclude posts/comments from users who don’t want to be included in the migration.

This kind of tool could dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to manually recreate communities and save valuable content from being lost.

I’d love to attempt this myself, but unfortunately I lack the time, technical know-how, and energy.

Has anything like this already been attempted, or is anyone working on a tool like this?

Curious to hear your thoughts — feasibility, technical hurdles, privacy concerns, etc.

#fediverse