Community Migration Kit
An orderly migration plan for when your community's platform goes dark: pick a destination, move together, keep a home base.
For fandom moderators and community organizers: a plan for moving a community in an orderly way during a platform outage, with a chosen destination and a caretaker crew for those who stay.
Install it in 3 steps
No sign-up. No CLI tools. Pick your AI, copy one line, paste it over.
Prefer doing it yourself? Buy the skill ($4.99), download the ZIP from your checkout confirmation, unzip it into the directory shown above, restart your AI session — same result. Already bought it? Your AI assistant can download it for you.
What's inside
One SKILL.md (the playbook) + one starter template. A preview:
Community Migration Kit
The idea in one paragraph
When a platform your community calls home goes dark, the community faces two bad options: scatter in panic, or freeze and wait. This skill builds a third option - an orderly migration kit with a chosen destination, a way to move together, and a plan for who stays behind and how the two groups stay connected.
What it is built on
- After the Archive of Our Own went down on 2026-10-29 with an outage expected to last at least two weeks, fans organized themselves: shared Google Docs of downloaded stories circulated as informal "survival guides."
- Some writers and readers began migrating to other platforms, including Inkitt, rather than wait out the outage.
- The community response was large enough to be reported by WIRED and The New York Times.
Workflow
- Pick the rally point (input: candidate platforms -> output: one primary destination). Score candidates on what your community actually needs: archiving, comments, mobile reading, moderation tools. Pick one primary and one fallback; never split the migration across five options.
- Decide who moves and who stays (input: member list or roles -> output: a two-group plan). Name the caretakers who stay behind to watch the original platform, post updates, and welcome returners. Everyone else moves in named waves - fandom by fandom, not all at once.
- Move the essentials first (input: your community's key content -> output: a moved archive). Migrate the irreplaceable first: pinned guides, reading lists, FAQ posts, and the member directory. Link back to originals where they still exist.
- Keep the bridge open (input: the two-group plan -> output: a cross-posting rule). Set a simple rule for what gets posted in both places during the outage - announcements, reading guides, new-member welcomes - so neither group goes silent.
- Plan the return (input: platform recovery news -> output: a return checklist). Decide in advance what triggers the move back: full restoration, read-only access, or a fixed date. The AO3 outage was expected to last up to four weeks, so plan for a month, not a weekend.
What good looks like
One destination everyone knows, a caretaker crew watching the old home, the essential archives already moved, and a written rule for what happens when the platform comes back. No member has to guess where the community is today.
Template preview
Community Migration Kit - Worksheet
1. Destination scoring
- Primary destination: ______________________ Fallback: ______________________
2. Two-group plan
- Caretakers staying behind: ________________________________________
- Migration waves (who moves first): ________________________________________
3. Essentials to move first
4. Cross-posting rule
Post in BOTH places: ________________________________________ Post in ONE place only: ________________________________________
5. Return triggers
- We move back when (check one): [ ] full restoration [ ] read-only access [ ] fixed date: ____ / ____ / ____
