And it’s not like exporting your subs to a CSV file or something to them upload to your new account on your new instance will work. Different instances will have different communities, so it won’t be a 1:1 transition.

I can definitely see the friction for new users if this happens.

We all know people are lazy, so if the friction proposed by Lemmy is more of a burden compared to the inconvenience proposed by Reddit or another social media platform, then people won’t change.

It would be interesting if there could be some tool that proposes similar communities on the instance you’re joining based on the communities you were subscribed to in your previous instance. Community federation could allow for that linked list that could be reverse searched and served to a user, precluded by uploading a CSV file of your communities so you don’t have to keep track of individual users in a server somewhere (which is anti-privacy anyways, and Lemmy imho is pro-privacy).