Now that smaller instances are disappearing, which instances do you think will stand the test of time?

Used this one, works very well.

If you don't have an experience using the command line then it's a tad more involved then I can explain in-depth on mobile. Best I can do is give a brief outline.

To start with, wescode/lemmy_migrate is a python 3 script. If you are running windows install WSL (Ubuntu), once you have a command line I am familiar with you will want to download the repository from GitHub to a directory.

You will then need to create a config file called migrate.conf Use the sample provided in the repo under configuration. Edit it to use your information. You can use nano as a text editor.

Then it looks like the command would be something like:

python lemmy_migrate -c ./migrate.conf

Sorry if that is crap help, but I'm not near my computer right now, and don't often use Windows anymore to boot.

PS:

WSL is a program from Microsoft that gives you a mostly functional Linux command line within Windows. None of this is as complicated as it sounds, I'm using more words then strictly necessary to explain things somewhat at beginner level. The most time consuming part of this would be first installing WSL and then installing Ubuntu onto WSL. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do so.

Hopefully someone more familiar with Windows can tell you how to do the same thing from either the DOS prompt or from Windows PowerShell. It's doable, (almost anything is) I'm just not familiar enough with either to walk you through it.

use https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim , easier

Look into the WSL

Here's a thread where I helped someone else with the process on windows: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/1420339

The steps are:

1. Set up the python code
   1. Go to https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate/releases/tag/v1.1.0
   2. Download the zip file
   3. Extract the zip file, to make a folder somewhere on your system called lemmy_migrate-1.1.0. Remember where this folder is
   4. Inside the folder you will find a file called config.ini. Use notepad to edit the file to have your server URL and login credentials.
2. Set up the python interpreter
   1. Install python from https://www.python.org/downloads/
   2. Open powershell
   3. install the python package requests by pasting the following command into powershell: py -m pip install --user requests
3. Use the python interpreter to interpret your python
   1. first make sure powershell is looking at the correct folder. One way to do this is to open the lemmy_migrate-1.1.0 folder in windows explorer. right click on the box that shows you the path, and copy the text. then write cd <pasted path> in powershell. This path will very likely be something like C:\\Users\Wu9fee\Downloads\lemmy_migrate-1.1.0. If you don't want to copy and paste the path from explorer, you can just do cd Downloads then cd lemmy_migrate-1.1.0
   2. Finaly, you can run the python command with py lemmy-migrate.py -c config.ini

Let me know if you run into any problems.

If you can pull this off, you can officially say you know how to code.