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.
@misty sad. I really like Mastodon, but I've heard anecdotally one of the bigger hurdles for people joining Mastodon was deciding on an instance at the beginning. I can imagine being able to migrate posts across instances would remove this hurdle.
@joshuatj Yup. :/ I see people who say “it doesn’t matter, you can always change later”, but that’s only true if you think your posts are of zero value. That’s not true for most people!
The Tattooed Nonna 🧙♀️@misty @joshuatj I was so attached to my history on twitter that I downloaded it all when I left.
But here i was determined to not become so obsessed with the past. I like that mastodon has an option for auto delete of posts.
But for people that want to save them, if you move servers, they still exist and you can add a redirect to your new server
But here i was determined to not become so obsessed with the past. I like that mastodon has an option for auto delete of posts.
But for people that want to save them, if you move servers, they still exist and you can add a redirect to your new server