The 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.
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The 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!
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The 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?
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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.
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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.
@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
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@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
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@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)
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@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!
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@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.
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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.
You know, the other thing I'm thinking is: as a community, we keep telling people to stay off mastodon.social. But if you signed up for mastodon.social in 2016 or 2017, it's one of the only options available that would still be working today with your full post history intact. If you signed up anywhere else, you've *probably* been through multiple migrations and lost your full posting history several times over.
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You know, the other thing I'm thinking is: as a community, we keep telling people to stay off mastodon.social. But if you signed up for mastodon.social in 2016 or 2017, it's one of the only options available that would still be working today with your full post history intact. If you signed up anywhere else, you've *probably* been through multiple migrations and lost your full posting history several times over.
If we want users to sign up on non-mastodon.social servers, we *need* to make server migration actually, genuinely painless and make it possible to actually bring over *all* of your account's content if you want that. Otherwise, "just use mastodon.social" will continue to be the lowest-risk option and picking another server will actually be riskier.
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If we want users to sign up on non-mastodon.social servers, we *need* to make server migration actually, genuinely painless and make it possible to actually bring over *all* of your account's content if you want that. Otherwise, "just use mastodon.social" will continue to be the lowest-risk option and picking another server will actually be riskier.
@misty I've been thinking about this since my first server change, and what I realized is that the biggest obstacle to this isn't even Mastodon's lack of support for it, but a huge limitation in the ActivityPub protocol itself: objects IDs must be “a publicly dereferenceable URIs [...] with their authority belonging to that of the originating server”. So even if the content would be copied over, all threads and references would still become invalid 8-(
1/?
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@misty I've been thinking about this since my first server change, and what I realized is that the biggest obstacle to this isn't even Mastodon's lack of support for it, but a huge limitation in the ActivityPub protocol itself: objects IDs must be “a publicly dereferenceable URIs [...] with their authority belonging to that of the originating server”. So even if the content would be copied over, all threads and references would still become invalid 8-(
1/?
@misty it would still be better than a total loss, but still catastrophically incomplete.
I can envision this being fixable with some kind of “object move” that servers recognize so that they can edit the in-reply-to etc to keep threads intact, even though plain URLs inside would still be broken.
Or maybe we need some other kind of “global derefernceable IDs” for the objects? Do the FEPs for nomadic identities support something like that?
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