MistyThe more and more old servers I see close, the more intolerable it is that Mastodon still doesn't offer a way to migrate data like posts to new accounts. A user's post history is valuable, and it's more valuable the older the account is. Users *should* have the option to migrate those to a new server!
I think for many users, if they lose their posting history when moving to a new server, they have less reason to stay here instead of moving to a new network. If they're losing everything anyway, why not move to bluesky or something else?
I'm thinking about this because I saw a Mastodon server of eight and a half years shutting down, which is leaving its migrating users in a very awkward position if they have years' worth of posts that are being lost.
It's not, to be clear, the server admin's fault - they don't control Mastodon's feature set. It's squarely the responsibility of Mastodon to supply the server migration tools necessary to resolve these problems for its users.
John Francis 🇨🇦🦫🍁💪⬆️@misty exporting posts is easy. Importing posts is intractable. The posts are backdated. The other accounts and instances mentioned in the backdated posts don't relate to the reposting account. Weird notification issues. Maybe tractable? Easy enough to just allow hanging a post archive searcher, viewer off the profile..."here's my old stuff", and allow the new account to use good old posts as a template.
EDIT: not intractable with appropriate limits
@johnefrancis It’s a solvable problem. GoToSocial can do this using a Mastodon archive export.
post-Gundam cryptography@johnefrancis @misty implementor here, it wasn't even that hard. the posts are backdated. conversations with other accounts aren't imported because of the context problem you mentioned. notifications and push federation are suppressed (boosting is still possible). compromises were necessary but it's still a massive improvement over "lol your Fedi posts are gone? put them on a static website outside Fedi".
the few people still working on AP are either uninterested in figuring out better post portability or don't have the time or clout to push any given scheme through, given that it'd need to be supported by a decent fraction of Fedi to work. that's unfortunate. but i'm mildly surprised nobody's patched Mastodon to support good-enough solutions, given that we don't have good ones yet.
@vyr @johnefrancis The existing follower/following account migration is itself a good-enough solution that's stood for many years; if that was good enough to ship, a good-enough compromise solution for post importing should be fine too.