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?
joshuatj@misty indeed. Are there third-party tools that might help with this? Or is this very much can only be done with changes in core?
@joshuatj There aren't. It has to be supported by the server, so there's nothing third party tools can do. GoToSocial can do it, working from a Mastodon data export, but Mastodon itself can’t.
Rihards Olups
Morgan ⚧️@misty @richlv @joshuatj I think that'd get tricky because if I someone replies to me and I reply to them, and then I move servers... If my account kept those posts, it couldn't maintain the thread there unless the other person's posts were also edited 😬 to mention my new account instead of the deleted one
Editing other people's posts feels like something my account, my server, or my old server should not have the authority to do
Editing other people's posts feels like something my account, my server, or my old server should not have the authority to do
@raphaelmorgan @richlv @joshuatj In an ideal world we'd have some kind of DID setup so post and user IDs aren't irrevocably tied to a specific server…
JJ 
@misty @raphaelmorgan @richlv @joshuatj you don't need DIDs -- you just need a consistent mapping from an old user id to a new user id and an old post id to a new post id. and a server->server bulk import tool and functionality for servers to update their internal user mappings upon a 301 permanently moved.
problems arise though because 1) mastodon's post ids are only unique per-server and 2) a server's internal representation of external users is a username@domain tied to an internal identifier, which needs to update upon receiving a 301. these are both doable, as i understand it -- but only really doable by someone very familiar with the codebase since ids are used everywhere... so realistically one of the very few masto core developers :c
@misty fwiw i wrote abt this in more detail and why i think it's feasible some time ago, if you're interested: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423#issuecomment-1956384303
(it got immediately misunderstood tho 🫤)
