I migrated servers last week and boy did I develop some strong opinions about migration and the as-yet only semi-fulfilled promise of account portability.
If you're thinking about moving instances—or you'd like to know yet more about my dreams for better networks—here's a post you might want to read:
Alright, so how come I'm [email protected] now when I was [email protected] yesterday, what's the story, what's everyone banging on about with the dot art and Welsh pixies and Meta meta and stuxes, alright here's the Short Version Stux = guy who runs mstdn.social and a bunch of other general-purpose fedi sites Welshpixie = lady who runs mastodon.art, an art focused mastodon website AJ = guy who runs retro.social, this website Meta = Facebook, hereafter referred to as Facebook because they don't get to change their name and wash away their past sins any more than my Lucky Goldstar dishwasher does Facebook: Mmmmmmay we pleasssse have a little CHAT with the big adminsssssss, we promissssse we'll be good this time <3 Fediverse in general: Haha get bent facebook, we weren't born yesterday Facebook: That wassss Facebook, we've reconssssidered, let'ssss be friendssss Me: Happily dunking on people who spell accessibility as a11y and completely oblivious to this whole conversation Welshpixie: Ey up, facebook are up to their old tricks again, remember not to fall for it guys Stux: Nasty Welsh Pixie, let's give them a chance, I will block your Whole Entire Domain mstdn.social website: A block you say, a defederation, now that's quite serious, that's for when you don't want anyone on your website to follow anyone on this other website, are you quite - Stux: yes I'm sure lol mstdn.social website: Very well, *chop* Everyone on mstdn.social who was following anyone on mastodon.art: suddenly, silently not following those people any more Everyone on mastodon.art who was following anyone on mstdn.social: also suddenly silently not following those people any more Everyone on both websites who was following anyone on the other website: WTF STUX Stux: oh uh yeah hm. Ahem. That may have been hasty. I wonder if I can undo some of the - mstdn.social website: nope Stux: I think I'll take a break from the computer for a bit Me: Drinking beer and playing Beat Saber with a couple of out-of-town mates and completely oblivious to this whole thing happening Me: goes to bed Fediverse: meta meta meta Me: good morning fediverse, what are the haps my frieWHAT THE HELL Me: WHERE'S MY GOOD MORNING ART Fediverse: meta meta meta Me: FACEBOOK? WHAT? Several People: Dan my server's gonna defed from yours in a week, can you move? Me: what no what's going on that's not enough time I've got things to do, tell you what though I'll have some time in the autumn and I like you too, can we catch back up then? Several People: we are chill and lovely and we understand Me: slowly pieces together what's going on while drinking a Winsford Mocha ---intermission because I have a fifty thousand character post limit now--- A Winsford Mocha is an analogue of this fancy "mocha" coffee stuff you tasted once in the far-off land of Chester, where they have coffee shops; you live in Winsford, which is a town best known for having Europe's last remaining salt mine, a literal man-made hole in the world, where there are no such frivolities, so you attempt your own. It's two spoons of instant coffee, two spoons of Cadbury's drinking chocolate, microwaved for a minute, stirred and microwaved for another minute, and drunk with thumb resting on the spoon because the contents tend to settle. ---intermission over--- Me: WTF STUX I HAVE NO IDEA WHO I WAS FOLLOWING FROM .ART APART FROM WELSHPIXIE, HOW AM I GOING TO RE-FOLLOW ALL MY ART PEOPLE Everyone on both affected sides of this whole shambles: YEAH SAME DAN I SEE YOU'RE LATE TO THE PARTY HERE Me: Sigh. I guess I'll move servers, AGAIN, and probably spend a month or two having random people look at my join date and tell me I'm using mastadon wrong, AGAIN, but this'll have to wait, I have Things To Do Mastodon: it's Mast-OH-don actually Me: I know The Fediverse: actually it's the F... ah, you know The Things I must Do: oh my god where do I even start, they are a nice even spread between equally important physical things and computer things and family things and some of them have Rather Tight Deadlines, I will spare you the details but this is why I said to several people lol see you in October Me: I am mad about this situation and I want to talk to someone IRL about it but how the hell do I even start to explain why this is even possible without that person resolving to never ever ever even glance at this whole fediverse thing Stux: *notices me, noticing him and his horrible mistakes* Stux: Say, that post of yours... not the one where you call me a wanker, it'd be a bit heavy-handed to delete that one, if I were to delete that one then you'd be able to say "Lol look at this fragile guy everyone" and you'd be right, but this one from yesterday: Me, from yesterday: "Extremely popular take that some here won't like but seriously need to sit with: spelling words like a11y or l10n or i18n or m17n is bloody incomprehensible and makes you look like an absolute w4r" Stux: yeah, that content violates the following community guidelines: "No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users." I am going to remove it. Me: oh no, not only is he not taking a break from the computer, he's back to pressing buttons and he's gone into petty "LOOK AT THE POWER I HAVE TO REMOVE YOUR VERY WORDS" mode, I have to move TODAY while I can still get an archive of my shite AJ: Hey you can put your shite here Me: Thank you AJ, I will put my shite right there. I will fill your website with my shite. Several long threads of mine which started on mastodon.social which is the website I was on before I was on mstdn.social which is the website I was on before I moved to retro.social today: lol what are you gonna do, make a blog? ---the story is done but so is the damage--- Everybody I was following on mastodon.art: I'm still not following them; there's no way to get that data back, shy of just kinda stumbling across folk and going "Oh I recognise them, *follow*" Everybody from mastodon.art who was following me, probably months from now: Hmm haven't seen that joystick pop up in my feed for a while, wonder if he died, *shrug* The Fediverse In General: LACKING in having tools to recover from the social damage that can be wrought with one reckless button press Facebook: hrmmmm yesssssssss, yum yum yum, *licks eyeballs* Me: sure hope next time this daft shite happens there's some kind of backup AJ: My server can do 50,000 characters Me: *makes USE of this, haha you all get TURBO DAN NOW*
Thank you very much - really useful. You're an encyclopaedia of fedi resources. :)
Attached: 1 image Here's the firefish.social admin/dev boosting Eris of Disqordia who is (both as a person and the instance) a bit infamous on fedi for anti-black harassment and just harassment in general So uh... :oof: (See next toot also)
@kissane Great article. 🎉 Still a fan of the fediverse and activitypub, but I have felt duped by the promise of simple and full portability as well.
I do see some new ideas and processes for it being considered and built, but not from Mastodon directly that I know of? And nothing that a non-technical social media person would ever WANT to figure out.
@box464 @kissane Fediverse account portability between domains works a lot better than any other comparable protocol -- email, Web sites, XMPP.
We don't even have to get into working with walled garden social networks.
That's not the standard we should hold ourselves to. It can get a lot better, and it will, but let's give a little credit to the fact that it works at all.
Technical achievements aside, and at the risk of making devs feel bad about their great work, this stuff comes down to unmet expectations and broken promises. So much of the difficulties of federation are glossed over to the point that the image is that it’s all positives. Negative surprises are unappealing user experiences, especially amidst such an air of positivity.
Maybe we need to readjust our needs re social media. But that’s not and unlikely to be the pitch.
Yeah, I feels like someone else I going to have to figure it out, be it a fork of mastodon or a completely different Activitypub network and mastodon starts losing users to it.
At least ganking and modifying foss code for your own foss thing is fine at the philosophical level. Though it probably hurts feelings, especially depending on how credit is metted out.
I ran into that one, and it actually kinda ruined mastodon for me. My first thought was to just rebuild but that wasn’t going well and eventually without these nice lists the feed was just confusing and I never got around to recreating them. There are some 3rd party tools apparently, but it was too late for me. Mastodon just became a sort of chaos, for better or worse.
3 angles from my side:
1. The technician (sysadmin for many years) - There is certainly room for improvements but some "simple things" aren't simple to implement.
2. The open source enthusiast: The requests come from all sides and some might be iffy. What's good for, let's say, Meta, isn't good for me.
3. The user: I compare it to a pub. It's fleeting by nature. Best bits end up in a "notebook" elsewhere.
I have 50+ followers, I can tell them where to find me when I move.
@petros @kissane Re the first item, it annoys me that Masto devs favour simplicity over the unsurprising.
Ideally, you architect your system to have unsurprising behaviour.
Failing that, you add some kind of adaptor layer to look unsurprising to users.
Failing that, your docs (and UI!) should make it clear how the thing will surprise you.
I know *so* much software doesn't do this, but every surprise sends such a message to Masto users...
(You got me on a pet whinge, not targeted at you.)
I am not sure what you are referring to. I see 2 categories:
Sometimes something may surprise you in a way that should be fixed. I get that.
Sometimes it is only surprising because people used abother platforms and expects it to work like what one used before.
One can try to emulate the "before". That is quite exhausting.
Or one does it differently and hope that people adapt.
I am using a Linux desktop which will make Windows users frustrated. But Windows frustrates me a lot!
@petros Well, the example from the OP is about account migration, which doesn't even exist on other platforms, so it's clearly in the first category.
There are a good number of things that just don't make sense for normal social media use. e.g. If I reply to a followers-only post, only *my* followers (and named people) can see my reply. Anyone trying to follow the wider conversation with limited follows can't. This exposes the internal model at the cost of usefulness.
@petros Having said all that, emulating the before is... complicated.
There's value there - e.g. we've got posts, boosts, likes and bookmarks. Copying's not all bad - many features are the result of built-up experience that we shouldn't ignore. Just understand the feature first.
The other side is that if you build something that looks suspiciously like a feature that exists on another platform *but behaves subtly differently* you're going to break expectations and make people sad.
@sgf That is true. What is the ideal? Going to both group of followers? It gets more complicated by block lists etc.
I am not an expert in Mastodon and social media and have no pre Experience on Twitter or Facebook. So I am reluctant to give advice on this :-)
@petros My personal feeling is that these things should be thread-based - that whoever posts the original entry should kind-of own that space (although maybe it would be better to have clearer tools to separate sub-threads than just dropping the original owner).
Given that, I'd default to "followers of original poster".
Private block and follower lists complicate things. I think it would be possible with a layer of indirection, but messy. Much of this is effectively on an honour code anyway!
@kissane Thank you. I've added your observations to my own list of migration caveats.
#MastodonMigration 🧵 Do final profile/post edits. Export prefs. Create new acct, set prefs, import. Boost old posts? Profile redirect locks the old acct (toggle later to unlock). Move takes days. As followers move, their lists lose your acct.⚠️ https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20538 (fix in 4.2) Posts export. Won't import. Lists export. Import w/ a tool. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15015 (fix in 4.2) https://mas.to/@peterbutler/109875218781905145 Profile notes won't export. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19959 Nor filters. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/9177
@kissane That was a great read.
I absolutely love your very obvious, and horribly overlooked, suggestions:
Test it - thoroughly.
Document it - throughly.
Those 2 points are so critical to the success of anything technical, and yet, they are often times done poorly or not at all. I get that writing documentation is not glamorous and is time intensive, and those alone turn off a lot of people from writing documentation, but it needs to exist.
One thing I've adapted when writing technical instructions: write it as non-technical form as you can. That helps to ensure the greatest chance of success.
That is really useful information! Thank you! 🤔 (I had no idea about the DMs aspect!! 😯 )
Also the list thing really bugs me. I have not tried migrating, but many people I follow have.
It's hard to keep lists, because people drop off when they move, and there is not even a record of what list to put them back into! 🤦♀️
@kissane
Great post! I started here by deciding that I want to test the migration first, and dug up my circa-2018 accounts (two) to migrate both of them to this account. Doing that, I ran into all of the stuff you mentioned, too.
I also ran into the ludicrous take that basically not migrating toots is Just Fine(tm) and expected, because No One(tm) should have old toots anyway, because Ephemeral and everything is set to auto-delete.
I had to conclude these people have no friends or family.
@kissane So much useful stuff here - I'd love to get it into the Github issues, not so much as I believe it would get quickly fixed, so much as making sure it's not unknown/unrecognised.
Would it be ok to link the page, or transfer the concerns anonymously to avoid any blowback, or maybe something else?
@kissane so, data migration works waaaaaaay better on the Web if you own your own domain.
I'd compare moving your WordPress blog from one service to another.
You download the data, upload it to the new installation, change the DNS, and shit just works.
You can do about the same thing with a single-user Mastodon instance right now.
It would be cool if you could do it with other server software: make a backup from your 1-user Masto, and restore it to your 1-user Calckey. Change the DNS, and it just works.
@kissane all of which is to say:
1) We should be encouraging people to get their own domain early in the onboarding process.
2) Fediverse software should support bringing your own domain. Takahē does it; others should follow suit.
3) Fediverse software should support both Webfinger accounts ([email protected]) and DNS hostname accounts (user.domain.example). That way, everyone gets a domain name, free, right away, but somewhat less under their own control.
@kissane I know that domains have their weaknesses as a root of identity on the Web and the social web.
They've also proved remarkably resilient over the last 30+ years of civilian Internet.
There are some other identity systems, like DIDs, that can supplement DNS, but right now, owning a domain is the best way to control your internet identity.
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