Is there some barrier to stop Lemmy from handling community migration the way Mastodon does? On masto, you can send a signal to all your followers which automatically unfollows them and refollows them to your new account. Instance migration is so easy there. I'm pretty sure following a Mastodon user and subscribing to a Lemmy community are similar under the hood so I wonder why similar behavior couldnt be put in for Lemmy
This is a good question. I don't think it is currently possible. However, I do think it's probably a good idea for the developers to think now (if they haven't already) about what happens to communities hosted on an instance if that instance is shutdown.
All of the posts and comments from that community from before the shutdown may already exist locally, but would local users even be able to keep using it? If not, might there be a way for the local instance to "adopt" a defunct community?