I grew up in a very rural area of the southern U.S. back in the 80s. The internet wasn’t quite a thing yet, so my window to the world outside my small town was our mailbox, located at Rural Route Box 464. I had pen pal letters, catalogs, magazines and comic books delivered in the mail and it was pure joy to run down the dusty road and check for something new every day.

The internet became my new window to the world, so it just seemed natural to use “Box464” as my address. Even got the domain!

Sharkey and Firefish both offer this, tho they handle it a bit differently. Those two are “built in” and the idea is that the imported posts don’t federate, they just get imported with you. You would lose favorites, boosts, and in most cases, reply history. Sharkey states they are able to import replies as well for Mastodon and Twitter, but I haven’t seen it in action yet (just came out this week).

Firefish - Import from other firefish instances, mastodon. I don’t know for sure, but I assume IceShrimp has this as well.

I tried Firefish, and it did work for my very small collection of posts from another instance.

Sharkey - Import from Misskey/Firefish, Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Sharkey states that for the Mastodon flavors and Twitter, replies to your posts are also imported (?) Not sure how that works.

If you have some technical background, there’s another option, Mastodon Content Mover tho it does “spam” your posts, so be sure to use this BEFORE you import or add followers. Just like the other options, replies, likes, boosts, etc. aren’t included. It’s written in Java.

Elk, the Mastodon web client, has an excellent development setup with good documentation and solid leadership. There’s lots of little fediverse startups. I’ve submitted some pull requests to Postmarks, a federated bookmark manager. It’s very early stages and fun to be part of that!

I’m just now starting to hear about this issue. Ouch.

They took on quite a lot all at once, and there’s some stability issues with the migrations that are taking priority right now. For the moment, the Calckey.social instance migration is on hold until those can be resolved. I was curious how it was going to work. Smaller instances have had success with the migration so far, so that is promising.

Not currently. If you visit the URL, like this one you can view the content, but you can’t currently follow it like a /kbin or lemmy group. That’s a great idea, tho, and it’s already been added as a feature request.

What I’m looking for is lists or collections that I can create or the admin of the instance creates that combines common topics into a digest of subs. Then I just browse one digest on a topic rather than having to go through each separately.

Having Kbin and Lemmy instances use a common catalog of topic identifiers so they can be easily coalesced would be helpful, too.