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.
filipa mv@misty ya, overall account migration needs work esp around adversarial admins or sudden shut offs.
this is not helpful but that said re post data i’m kinda leaning towards opposite in that i feel it’s maybe healthier that this is a somewhat ephemeral medium?
if your server dies repost your faves and let The Archive handle the rest kinda vibe
@misty this thought is informed by when i wanted to migrate off xitter and i got all of my post data and i thought of hosting it somewhere but
i came to the conclusion that i myself could not be arsed to read through thousands of dumb tweets to pick out the good ones & the risk of hosting a convo i would now regret seeing was not worth it
@misty (i’m not trying to contradict the feeling you have & rightfully point out that people care about this stuff! more a reflection of an epiphany i had where i realized that i didn’t care about it as much as i thought i did)
@phillmv Ywah, I think that’s a valid perspective. I have a bit of a knee jerk reaction to it mostly because the conversation thus far has been dominated by people with that perspective arguing that as a result the migration option *should not exist at all, for anyone, even as a choice*, and that’s led to the current situation where Mastodon doesn’t allow it. I think it’s totally fine for post migration to be opt-in but there’s enough people with post histories where it matters it should exist!
mcc@misty @mcc idk what i would do if i were god-empress but related vibes:
- humans are cognitively unequipped to handle every stray thought being permanent
- in a world with finite resources is it sustainable to archive every stray thought? maybe it’s a hoarding instinct
- we deal a lot with this at work where we spend a fair bit of resources to store a lot of data we know no one ever looks at it & it causes scaling issues
- bracketing historical research, *no one including myself* will ever read through my post archive. a lot of tweets grow stale. maybe 5% of my posts are worth preserving?
Kim
Samantha Rose@FizzyDaisies If the old server is still up you can, as your old account still exists and you can log in so you can delete posts as you like.
Of course if you deleted your account you can't do that, but then your posts will all be gone from the server anyway.
What happens to posts cached on other servers is a bit less clear, but I think (not sure!) that they will in most cases always be deleted after some time anyway.
@samantha42 That’s great. Thank you! I moved from Mastodon(dot)social and never tried to login after. I didn’t know I could delete that account. That’s even better.
@FizzyDaisies Yes! After you've migrated you're still able to log back into the old account to do a few things like post deletion.
@misty Excellent. Thank you!