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
ActivityPub (which is the protocol used by Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, and other fediverse platforms) doesn’t have a built-in system for account migrations. Accounts are tied to an instance. Any migration features are handled at the application level, like Mastodon’s, and will be limited by the protocol.
ATProto, which the protocol used by Bluesky, has a more complex account system which does allow for migration. I’m not intimately familiar with the details, but the gist is that your DID is not tied to your instance, and your data store can be independent as well. I don’t know how this works in practice, since the ATProto ecosystem is basically just Bluesky, and a few other things that piggyback on Bluesky accounts. It appears to be at least a little complicated: https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/adversarial-pds-migration.html
Honestly, yes, this is a problem with the design. ActivityPub is not resilient against servers going offline or going rogue. It’s a lot like email. If you change email providers, that means a new identity, and all you can do is point people to it as best you can.