I would really love if this became an option, since I’m planning on making my own instance. I’d like to keep my subscriptions, posts, comments and bookmarks and migrating would be something great. What do you think?
I would really love if this became an option, since I’m planning on making my own instance. I’d like to keep my subscriptions, posts, comments and bookmarks and migrating would be something great. What do you think?
The way it works on Mastodon is you essentially set up your new account on the new instance first, then you fill in the migration settings on both accounts. One to say where you’ve moved to, one to say where you’ve moved from. This adds a migration notice to your original account telling people who stumble across it where they can find you.
You can export and reimport all the important things like your bookmarks etc, but your posts stay behind on the old profile. Your followers / following is moved across, which in this case would be analogous to your subscriptions which are of course the most important thing.
I think a system like that would be perfectly fine here too. You don’t really need to bring all your posts over to a new profile, they’ll still be there and accessible on your old one if you need them.
Unless the old instance goes offline forever. Your posts and comments would still exist on remote instances, but the user profile they point to is no longer accessible.
Yes, copying subscriptions is probably the most important step, but ultimately I hope to see the ability to move everything, including history and notifications to old stuff.
That’s true but it’s equally true of all content you put on literally any website ever, so I figure I can choose to worry about that (in which case I guess you get into the world of exporting and scraping and backing up everything you ever contribute anywhere, which some people are really into and that’s fair!), or to not worry about that.
I’m hoping it will be rare to see an instance shut down without warning. I imagine admins in most situations would make a post warning people and give them time to migrate.
What about the comments? Is it the same thing?
Yeah. A better way to describe Mastodon “migration” would be to call it account linking, or account forwarding. Each time you make a new account on a different instance you leave behind directions to the current one. Kind of like migrating your email account and leaving the old address to “forward” stuff to the new one.
I agree that it’s a much cleaner system than attempting to actually move content around.
Yeah all content stays behind, so that’s your toots (posts) and replies (comments). I was bit wary of migrating because of that, but just needed to change my outlook a bit and remember all online content is temporary. Tbh since your followers etc all move over with you it’s made no difference at all and I can still log into the old account if I need to admin anything. Works fine!