Strangely, data portability is very low priority.
There really should be some server support for this – but OTOH it’s not paramount. Theoretically, anyone could write a client app that harvests all of a user’s posts and comments into a local DB, and then recreate threads (not comments) in a corresponding community. It would have to add some metadata about the date of the original post. Not great, but could be done.
yall aren’t deleting your accounts and making new ones every year or two?
Perhaps I should be. But that would only increase the need for a backup app. In fact, a backup app would encourage me to have shorter lived accounts because maintaining an account would no longer be a precondition to accessing my past content. From there, using upload functionality would be optional.
A backup for what exactly?
For cases where the instance is someone else’s. Instances vanish out of the pure blue sometimes. I’ve lost lots of content that way. Also useful for offline reference for those of us who do not have Internet at home.
Interesting, thank you
So far there are subscription export and import tools. However for posts and comments there do not exist any atm.
I’m trying to think of a way that would not be too resource intensive, and within the spirit of “not re-writing history”.
I think if you had to move, you would want to try to make it irreversible (once the feature is stable enough), lock your old account and it will link on the profile page to your new one.
This is how I might implement it: During the move process, the original canonical link could stay attributed to your old account handle (perhaps with a note saying “account moved” in the same way there’s an indicator for a banned account), no other changes to the original post. Then under your new profile your old aliases are registered, and old posts appear under your profile with your handle replaced by something like this: “user@newserver as user@oldserver”. There is a chance that links to posts on defunct servers or ones your new servers are deferated with might be broken or missing. Being able to locate your old handle’s posts using your new handle in search would be difficult but that could come as a feature later.
I think I can force a new instance to cache a copy of an old post simply by searching for the old post using the URL as a query. That would get a verbatim copy of the post (perhaps along with the whole thread) on the new instance. But of course from there the problem is that the new cached version is still associated to the previous (foreign) community. Without knowing the code, I would speculate that it would just be a matter of changing the community it appears in to a local one in the DB (though it would of course have to be done server side).