Presentation of the feature: https://piefed.social/post/667045
Example of successful migration: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45876492
Our next step would be to give this feature a try. What would basically happen is that
- we would lock our community to prevent integrity issue during the migration
- https://piefed.social/c/fedigrow@lemm.ee would become https://piefed.social/c/fedigrow , with all the existing posts and comments
- you all would subscribe to the new !fedigrow@piefed.social , and then continue as usual
Should the migration not work, we would still be able to use the current community, and then manually migrate elsewhere.
The one caveat is that from Lemmy instances, the community doesn’t have show old posts (see https://lemm.ee/c/barcelona@piefed.social), but if you were restarting a community from scratch you wouldn’t have access to your old posts anyway.
Other federated instances like feddit.online would also see the posts and comments on the new community: https://feddit.online/c/barcelona@piefed.social
The objective of this post is to address any questions or issues before we move forward. We are probably going to leave it open for 48 hours, and then reassess based on the community feedback.
Disclaimer: if you prefer Lemmy, you would still be able to interact with the new Piefed community as if it was a Lemmy community (e.g. : https://lemmy.world/post/30619912). The main pro here would be able to recover all of the past content in an active community, compared to only having it archived in a lemm.ee community.
So the Piefed/Lemmy choice wouldn’t really change a lot for a user, you can still use your platform of choice to interact with the community.
Now, about Piefed itself:
Feature-wise, it is already ahead of Lemmy
App support is starting, with Interstellar supporting it (https://piefed.social/post/817564) and Thunder going to work on it (https://lemmy.world/comment/17459098)
Also, I’m not sure about the “final project of a CS class” aspect, it’s not like Lemmy doesn’t have its own quirks and issues (!languagesettings@lemmy.zip , all of the features above missing).
Of course, the UI could be improved (I still prefer the Lemmy UI, probably a matter of habit), but as the Piefed API has now been enabled, we can expect Photon, Alexandrite and others to support it too in the future.