Anil DashOkay, here's a remarkable thing about the fediverse: I was able to seamlessly move my followers to a new server, and the vast majority of them *never even noticed* that it happened. About 24 hours ago, I decided to move from mastodon[dot]cloud (because it had been bought up by sketchy new owners), and I came to @medium's new me.dm instance. At that time, I had 25,829 followers, and now less than 24 hrs later, I have 22,648 followers on this new account — without them having to do anything.
The entire migration process took me a couple of minutes (basically, you just tell your new account that you want to migrate from your old one, then tell your old account where you're going). Now, I think this may be one of the largest follower migrations in fediverse history, so there was a little bit of weirdness in some apps and the website in terms of getting a *ton* of notifications (tens of thousands of follows) but after that settled, it was smooth sailing. And invisible to followers.
Evan Prodromou@anildash what about your follows? Did it happen automatically too?
daniel s.@evan no, but that's just an easy import/export of a CSV file.
@anildash Cool, ty
Carlo Piana 😼@carlopiana @evan yes that’s correct.
Nate@anildash @carlopiana @evan ostensibly that old server could decide to be vindictive and revert your webfinger redirect (sorry if I used terms incorrectly here), right?
@innonate @carlopiana @evan oh yeah, it’s not protocol-level accountability, it’s a nicety of mastodon implementation
@anildash @carlopiana @evan anyone working on abstracting this? N00b here but I assume there’s a DNS-like proposal out there.
Matunos
Stygian Lizard@carlopiana @anildash @evan So basically, export your follows periodically, just in case? (I also have no idea how to do this, but I'm hopeful there's an article about it somewhere.)
Frank@shadyspotlight @carlopiana @anildash @evan as I had a similar issue these days: Doing an export of CSV periodically is a good idea, but for migrating your followers the old server still needs to be up&running; if it just disappears, no chance to migrate followers AFAIK
Clemens Kieninger
kfan@anildash you know who else had one of the largest follower migrations in history? Jesus
@kfan what's his @
Mark Shane Hayden
Hisham
David Cook
emily dogmom@hisham_hm @msh @anildash @kfan sort of making me think of the running joke in HBO's Julia. "We got 27 letters about you!" "...and that's a lot?"
Pax Ahimsa Gethen 🏳️⚧️The one thing I have had to update for you and others who have migrated is to re-add you to the custom lists I've set up.
@funcrunch oh that's good to know! I hadn't realized it would break those features.
Aswath Rao@anildash @funcrunch If we allow "bring your own acct URI", then many of these issues would go away. We fought so hard for number portability in PSTN, but now we just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I am not sure whether it is possible to migrate from Mastodon to Pleroma.
Of course nobody talks about loss of posts and that also can be fixed.
Of course nobody talks about loss of posts and that also can be fixed.
Chris Ainsworth@funcrunch @anildash ahh, good to know, I had no idea that migration lost placement on a list. That might get cumbersome if folks start hopping around.
👨🏻💻☕@anildash right now, other than moving *away* from the ownership structure of your previous server, is there upside in me moving to me.dm or somewhere else?
@hunterwalk good question. I think thriving masto instances have interesting "local" timelines, of those others who are on the same server as you. Right now the Medium instance is quiet since there's only a few of us on here, but I can imagine it'll be fairly interesting once they start bringing writers over. I do also like their content moderation policies and it is way more up to date mastodon software than the .cloud instance, so there are new features too.
@anildash got it. has anyone written anything interesting on theories for how "your server" will/won't matter over time?
Jon Sagara@anildash I wondered if I would have to manually follow you on the new server. Stoked that I didn’t have to.
live, laugh, loni@anildash at first i was sceptical of the claimed record-breaking scale but then i remembered u invented blogging
@lawnsea please stop bullying me!
v̾i̾t̾r̾i̾o̾l̾i̾x̾@anildash I really love how forwarding works, it's really slick
Benjamin Carlsson@anildash do you know what happened to the missing 3k followers?
@ben likely just slow updates from their instances; my follower count is over 23k now, a day later. I’ll dig into it to try to understand more.
msgbi
Ellen Pao@anildash ugh I just signed up for an account on me.dm to migrate. I missed the news of the sale. glad it was not hard and thanks for the heads up
Tony Stubblebine
[jan@dembowski:~]$ 
@anildash f@myn a I