Instances can go down, disappear or be unresponsive due to many reasons.

Go to your account settings now and export your account settings!

This file contains your subscriptions, follows, profile settings etc. It's very easy to start over on a new instance when you have your export file.

Back it up, export it, save it, repeat occasionally.

Great idea, one of those retrospectively obvious ideas that never occurred to me!

This simply needs to automatically happen every week or so.

Is there a way to do this in Voyager?

How though? A website cannot just access your hard drive and write stuff, as far as I know.

Mine is a 200kB text file (I imagine much smaller if compressed into e.g. a zip file), so it could just be attached in an e-mail 🤔

Wait, doesn't every website do this? Or are there websites that only live in RAM?

No, you can only backup your Voyager settings from the app.

How about a desktop client?

Or you know, just embrace impermanence.

Settings -> general -> backup and restore settings

No websites should be able to access anything on your hard drive arbitrarily.

Websites can ask the browser to store something in cookies, or local db storage; it can even say “here’s a file for download”. But it cannot just decide to place a download somewhere in your filesystem.

The browser itself is accessing your filesystem to read and write cookies, cache, etc. and the website has (rightfully so) zero control over that, other than asking permission and offering up a link to something the browser may to may not decide what to do with.

Didn't claim arbitrary access, just writing to hard drive. But I see, so the browser is the mediating layer

☝️

Plus it’s going to be a lot lire work to extract that when the website that wrote to it is no longer accessible. Easier to just click the backup button and download a file.

Automate a script to do it. It's easier to make simple automations than most people would think

you guys get too serious about social media. just let the whole thing burn. youll register another temp email the next day and browse the same 3 active subs.

@general@lemmy.worldThis file contains your subscriptions, follows, profile settings etc.Just an addendum so Fediverse newcomers don't assume things from your "etc.": , at least not without republishing, IIRC. There are Fediverse platforms that allows for "importing" these from an old account (the platform I use, a Misskey fork, has this feature), but all it does is republishing anew, as neither authorship nor timestamp from old activities are reassignable, as per ActivityPub standards. To complicate things, republishing isn't something nice to do when the person has a history comprised of thousands of activities, including replies/threads where handles for Lemmy communities are mentioned (so I guess each post would end up as new, repeated threads/replies across the threadiverse).I say this because I'm currently facing this exact conundrum myself: for almost a year, I've had a Calckey account (@dsilverz@calckey.world) from which I've posted a thousand notes, (mostly) including interactions with Lemmy and hundreds of microblogging, but then the instance I was housed in started getting some issues beyond the scope of this reply (rule 5). I saw myself in need of seeking another instance, one that uses the same platform (because I liked Misskey, its features and how it allows for having both threadiverse communities alongside a personal feed), and I found the nice Catodon instance I'm currently housed in.I was able to easily customize my new account's settings with the same settings that of my earlier account (because both platforms share the same Misskey origins), including the vampe UI theme I use, but the only thing I can practically do regarding my thousand posts is exporting these as a JSON and redownloading their media in some kind of post-mortem archive, because even republishing my microblogging posts would be unfeasible (I mean, technically speaking I , it doesn't mean I , because it'd end up as a flood of posts, so I'm not doing it).

This is different from the account backup and only includes voyager settings.

There’s a file api you can use to interact with the file system directly. Practically, I’m not sure how much it would help, since you could only access it with permission while the website is open, and there’s no way to sync between devices, but it is hypothetically possible to write a feature that backs up your settings periodically.

One of the most surprising things about developing for the fediverse is different social media users use social media very differently.

I follow like 50 communities I will never get exposed to again, because I switched instances already.

fuck you entropy you won't get to me
not when i finish The Machine