Mastodon is just like a big old pile of Twitterlike islands with different names. Some of the islands let you stalk people on other islands, but none of them have the capacity to handle the population of the mainland (Twitter).
@leila @mnateshyamalan
While you might be able to pack your stuff from one island and create an account on another,.you obviously won't be able to carry followers (though maybe you can reimport the list of people you follow).
I also doubt you can import your posts, and even if you did, you'd be unlikely to maintain data such as post date.
Some of the islands have more moderation, and some may be run by benevolent dictators.
I think it'll be a combination of all three.
@bobo_of_id @leila @mnateshyamalan
You know, maybe I'll look at the documentation. I can't imagine it's hard to setup as containers - it's just hard to scale it or keep it running reliably.
It's pretty remarkable that these admins can keep it up with what's likely a small budget.
Ah, found it:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/
So, cool,.you can export your data and reimport it on a new instance. And it does do a forwarding on the old account. But, I bet that goes away if the old server goes away (though maybe your new server and other servers will cache that forward).
With the sad news that KNZK was shutting down we thought it might be useful for people to have a refresher on the features that Mastodon has built in that make moving instances easy and painless. Backing up Your Data Data export If you are moving to a new instance the first thing you will want to do is to get a backup of all of your data. Thankfully this process is painless with the Data Export tab under the “Import and Export” page.
I think most people get confused by federation. I suppose the most common use is when you can use your Facebook or Gmail id to log into other sites.
Since each Mastodon server is kind of like its own Twitter site, federation is certainly useful.
@bobo_of_id it's certainly not a terrible analogy, as email administrators can block other email servers from sending to them.
I guess the only major difference is that this is more about messages that persist for everyone to read. Email messages mostly persist in inboxes.
There is certainly more of a community with mastodon.
Musk would have to buy multiple Mastodon communities at $44 billion to own mastodon, and people could still build new ones. 😆
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Leila B
Kyle Rose