The problem is that it only works if the ideal scenario occurs being that we all work together to make things better. Corporate interaction in open source has shown that embrace, extend, extinguish is a very successful strategy.
Would we be harming the idea of a completely open network? No doubt. The question is whether or not allowing corporations would be better or worse for us in the long run.
It could be done, but that really isn't the best possible solution in my opinion. What I was thinking was having a bot migrate all the comments and posts here (or another instance). So the bot would take all the names of the users and replace them with the bot's names (instead of trying to create new users on lemmy) and put the old usernames in their comment. Like "Bread commented" and their comment. So we know who said it still.
If the bot maker had control of the instance, we probably might be able to put everything in chronological order by timestamp. So it would look like the comments were all made here orginally. The only indicator it wasn't would be the bot name as the username. So search algorithms would be able to search it just like reddit.
I believe the best way to archive a forum style website, would be on a forum where things have one to one equals.
As for moving Datahoarder to a new instance, that sure would make backups a lot nicer if a datahoarder ran it. I am surprised that it isn't on its own already considering the topic. Same thing with self-hosted.
The problem is that it only works if the ideal scenario occurs being that we all work together to make things better. Corporate interaction in open source has shown that embrace, extend, extinguish is a very successful strategy.
Would we be harming the idea of a completely open network? No doubt. The question is whether or not allowing corporations would be better or worse for us in the long run.