And it’s not like exporting your subs to a CSV file or something to then 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 previous 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).
Having the ability to export your account data (say to a CSV) might be useful for this reason.
If you want to move to a new instance, you can pack your bags and head out.
You can probably imagine how this won’t be a 1:1 transition, however, because the new instance might not have the same communities as the old instance. I commented on another thread about how it would be cool if Lemmy took your communities list, looked at how those communities federate for instance (or just do a word search on the new instance with names of the communities of the old instance), and serve you suggested new communities to subscribe to.
And if you can export your data, then there’s no need to store it in a centralized way to make these types of actions doable, which favors privacy.