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!
@phillmv I run my own server so I’m not vulnerable to unexpected shutdowns, thankfully. But my own post history does have plenty of things I actually would want accessible from the same server I’d continue posting to after moving.
I could do that on GoToSocial or, ironically, Bluesky. But it’s simply not an option on Mastodon.
D. Olifant Still Won't Shut Up@misty @phillmv My suggestion is to get the Mastodon archive regardless, and you can at least preserve your posts as a static HTML archive with Posty.
Bringing them over to a new instance, as others have mentioned, is currently only supported on GoToSocial via Slurp.
I wrote this piece on how I closed down Oliphant Social and maintained a static archive of the posts there.
@oli I think it’s great that exists! It provides an excellent solution for people with the technical skills to accomplish it, and looks very slick. I think it’s beyond the means of most of the users I’m thinking of though.
@misty Absolutely.
The 'static archive' thing should be either part of the Mastodon export, or Mastodon should facilitate it. (They created the export format, after all, just never gave us any way to use it in Mastodon itself.)
And I'm hoping GoToSocial will just build in some kind of functionality that lets you point it at your former account (after an account move, perhaps) and stream over your posts from the active server.
But Mastodon should also just build this feature, too.
jerI'm hoping GoToSocial will just build in some kind of functionality that lets you point it at your former account (after an account move, perhaps) and stream over your posts from the active server.
This is almost halfway there already, as you don't even need a Mastodon export. After authenticating, slurp will pull all the posts from a live instance and dump them to a file. I bet being able to pipe the output of slurp downloading into slurp uploading wouldn't be a very big amount of work.
@nyquildotorg @misty It's a natural conclusion, and Slurp is also written in Go, and Vyr contributes to GoToSocial and even did the patch for backdating posts that made it all possible in the first place.