People need to realize you can use alternatives
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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I think people naturally tend toward the servers of the people that started the project and also the servers that have the most people on them. As the federated technology continues to smooth out I think more people might be more comfortable spreading out to other servers.
Personally I started out on the Beehaw server but they had some rules I didn't like so then I found another server.
I couldn't deal with the no downvote button in beehaw server. Lemmy.ml seemed to be fit my preference best when I joined at the time. There's also the fact that there's no way to migrate your history right now so I'm staying where I am atm I guess. It also feels like the main instance is the less likely to go down in the future
Wouldn't that make you lose your entire history though? Or is there a way to migrate a user account to another lemmy server?
There is currently no way to migrate to my knowledge
Honest question, because I saw a lot of people on Reddit worrying about this as well: what is the fear about losing your history? Maybe your usecase is different from mine, but I don't mind if I lose my history at all. (Hence the question)
It's a system for social interaction. I participate in these discussions to relate to other people and with the possibility of building connections with others. I'm in general the kind of person who don't think activities are worthwhile unless they sort of "move something forward", i.e. leaves some sort of imprint on the world or myself. I'm uninterested in sports or games like Overwatch because I feel like when a match/season is done it just starts over again, so nothing has really substantially changed.
With a history, I build an online identity over time. What I do today affects how people perceive me tomorrow. If everything would be one-shot and I just started over with a new profile every day, it wouldn't feel like it mattered. There are other reasons like nostalgia or being able to answer in "necrothreads" (I actually received a reply on a 12-year-old comment on Reddit last week!).
Also, it's a way for people to reach you. People stick by their email account for the longest time even if they don't like the provider anymore, because telling everybody about an address change is such a hassle. When I got out of GMail I set up my own domain and run my email on there. That way I can move to another provider without anyone noticing. Perhaps I could set up my own Lemmy server with just myself on it so I can keep my identity stable, but I have a feeling that solution won't scale well.
I can kinda get all that, but what I'm missing is the role of your history in this question. (I assume that this is about saving your own posts).
Keeping the account for occasional use & maybe putting a sticked post in your post history with links to your new account on a different platform, I can kind of understand. But the way I see saving my own history, it'd be about reading back my own posts, which don't really serve me a function on a different platform.