Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

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.

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.

@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.

@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!

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.

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?

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!