Move a community

[aeharding]

Requirements

• Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support
• Did you check to see if this issue already exists?
• Is this only a feature request? Do not put multiple feature requests in one issue.
• Is this a backend issue? Use the lemmy-ui repo for UI / frontend issues.
• Do you agree to follow the rules in our Code of Conduct?

Is your proposal related to a problem?

Communities often need to move (instance shutting down, renaming etc). The hardest thing about moving is regaining subscribers, because right now it requires every single subscribe to subscribe again to the new community.

For example:

• https://lemmy.world/c/wefwef -> https://lemmy.world/c/voyagerapp
• https://lemmy.world/c/casualconversation -> https://lemm.ee/c/casualconversation

Describe the solution you'd like.

I would like the option to move my community.

This would do the following:

1. Turn old community read-only.
2. Tell users when they try to load the old community that it has moved, while still allowing users to browse the old community.
3. Subscribe users to new community.
4. Unsubscribe users from old community.
5. Prevent moving again for 30 days.

It will NOT move over posts/comments/sidebar etc. Nothing more would be done than the above items. More complex implementations are left to #3100.

Describe alternatives you've considered.

You can create a new community, make a pinned post on the old community, but this works really poorly and slowly and causes a lot of user confusion.

Alternatively this could be addressed by #3100, but that issue is pretty vague and massive.

This could be addressed by #3048 although that issue is not very clear. For example, would it allow redirecting to remote community? Would it move over followers?

Additional context

This should work similarly to Mastodon's Profile Redirect: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#redirect

A nice side affect of this issue: Addressing this would allow communities to merge, that is, combine followers onto one community.

[dessalines]

We can't move a community, but a redirect, which then sends a move request out to followers to change to the new community, might work.

[db0]

Ye this is a similar approach done on mastodon