sure you can just make a new one, but all of your old posts and comments won’t show up. Not to mention your DMs too
it seems kinda counterproductive to the goal of lemmy being federation where you can just move to another instance if yours gets bought by Elon or an admin goes corrupt, but it’s not made simple to do that.
I’ve seen many people be on lemmy.ml that would switch but they’ve been using it since the start of lemmy and they don’t wanna restart
I know mastodon has a little “hey this user has moved to @user@newinstance” popup but that’s not really that elegant either
There is no good way to transfer already sent messages and written posts. Transfering all satabase entries connected to your user account may be possible, but depending on how active you’ve been, this would already cause a lot of traffic. The next issue is images. Do you transfer them also? That would mean even more traffic. How do you handle federated content? Your messages not only live on your home server, they are duplicated to all federated instances. You’d have to contact all instances to change owner of those posts. Alternatively, your old server would have to keep redirecting to your new account. All in all, there are so many edge cases to consider for so little gain, it doesn’t make sense to invest dev time into it.