The old account is still there if you need to refer to a previous comment.
You “reputation” (in “people recognizing you in comments”) can be the same if you keep the same name and avatar.
There are no karma requirements anywhere on Lemmy.
The one I get is moderators that don’t want to move their communties, but for individual accounts, there isn’t much to lose (and trust me, I have around a dozen alts)
I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren’t integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.
Sublinks would work th same way as Mbin does. People on Mbin can currently interact with all the Lemmy content in a similar way Lemmy users do.
The reason this effort didn’t work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse.
To be fair, when the migration happened, Lemmy wasn’t ready. Federation was still flimsy, and LW was under constant DDoS attack. Lemmy is in a much better state now.
Feel free to start your own, to be honest I feel it’s like the only major language missing now, as we have PHP with Mbin, Rust with Lemmy, Python with Piefed and Java with Sublinks
LW is unique in the way that it is by far the largest instance, it makes sense that they want to take their time to update, they usually come up with unique issues.
If people could move away from it to other generalist instances, that would help with the issues. My former main instance, Reddthat, is now unable to fetch votes in a quick way because LW centralizes so much of the users and communities. More details can be be found here: reddthat.com/post/16122033
Now that LW is on 0.19.X, users can move to another instance in two clicks from the settings.
I see. Well, good luck with this. If that helps, I noticed that if you communicate openly with your community, explain a progressive plan, the transition can go quite smoothly (I moved communities from LW in the past).
Losing the posts sucks indeed, maybe we should bring this topic as its own thread to see if someone wants to work on a tool to allow export and import of posts.
Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.
May I ask why you didn’t move to another generalist instance? It’s a two clicks operation now to export and import settings from the settings menu