Hi, I’m not self hosting, but I’ve realised I’ve spent a decent amount of time on this social media, and written a few things I may want to revisit in the future.
I was wondering if there was a way to “back up” my account, so if something happened to my host instance, I would still be able to have a copy of the comments and posts I made :).
I’m not expecting to be able to “transfer” my account to a new one, but have a backup of posts and comments for personal storage, having a copy on my harddrive.
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I’m aware of this library for it: https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-archive
Dunno about any easy button-click service for it though, which is why we’re building it into Weird, which is like a CMS for your digital identity.
Which service? Mastodon has a built-in export functionality in preferences.
I can’t find such an option on Lemmy, but you should be able to do a GDPR request for your information as a last resort.
edit: Non-post data / user settings can be exported (and imported!) but posts are a separate issue. See this open issue.
I’m not a lawyer, but since Lemmy instances aren’t “professional or commercial activity”, I doubt a GPDR request would be applicable.
Some people who run instances might have the ability to do some sort of database export for a specific user, but the vast majority of us are just barely technical enough to keep Lemmy running and updated.
The last time I touched our database I accidentally wiped out all data older than 1 month and had to restore a backup.
I think we do have the option to remove a user by purging them through the UI, but an export isn’t an option at this point.
