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Codesmith

@jonah I have not done an exhaustive search, but so far as I have been able to tell, no one supports actual account migration as an average user would expect it to work. Just follower migration. Do you know of ones that do full migration (including posts)? Or are you saying that lots don't even allow follower migration?

9 Feb 2023 at 17:49 | Wall-to-wall | Open on techhub.social
20 comments
helge

What you are talking about sounds like a nomadic identity. My expectation is that the Fediverse is still far away from being able to implement something like this.

9 Feb 2023 at 18:01 | Open on mymath.rocks
Jonah Aragon

@codesmith I'm not a expert on things other than Mastodon really, but AFAIK at this time the only AP servers that even do follower migration are Mastodon and Pleroma. Not Pixelfed, not Misskey, not PeerTube, not Wildebeest, etc. etc.

I don't know of any at all which do full migration with posts and everything, which would certainly be even better than follower migration, but with all the complexity around how that would affect post permalinks and everything it seems a lot more reasonable for that to not really exist at the moment.

I think for most people the ability to retain their audience is far more important than the ability to retain their old posts, IMHO anyways, and I think that a lot of people are creating their profiles on platforms β€” maybe assuming that it has the same migration functionality Mastodon has β€” which trap their audience there, which is concerning to me.

@codesmith I'm not a expert on things other than Mastodon really, but AFAIK at this time the only AP servers that even do follower migration are Mastodon and Pleroma. Not Pixelfed, not Misskey, not PeerTube, not Wildebeest, etc. etc.

I don't know of any at all which do full migration with posts and everything, which would certainly be even better than follower migration, but with all the complexity around how that would affect post permalinks and everything it seems a lot more reasonable for that...

9 Feb 2023 at 18:01 | Open on mastodon.neat.computer
Codesmith

@jonah Interesting. I was not aware how rare follower migration is.

I agree that generally people care more about follower migration than true migration, but I've seen a lot of relatively new accounts rather upset because they were told that in the Fediverse you can migrate your account any time you want. And to the average person, "migrate your account any time you want" does not make them think "oh this means I can migrate my followers but none of my content." They think it means everything. So I think if Fediverse devs are thinking true account migration is years out, if ever, then we all really need to be careful with our lingo and call it "follower migration" rather than "account migration."

@jonah Interesting. I was not aware how rare follower migration is.

I agree that generally people care more about follower migration than true migration, but I've seen a lot of relatively new accounts rather upset because they were told that in the Fediverse you can migrate your account any time you want. And to the average person, "migrate your account any time you want" does not make them think "oh this means I can migrate my followers but none of my content." They think it means everything. So...

9 Feb 2023 at 18:11 | Open on techhub.social
Jonathan Glick

@jonah Thank you for these reminders, Jonah. To what extent do you think it would be possible to build a generic migration system for follows, followers and posts, for the entire β€˜Fediverse?’

9 Feb 2023 at 18:16 | Open on mstdn.social
Jonah Aragon

@Jonathanglick a standard migration process already exists for moving your follows/followers to your new account, it's just that pretty much everything besides Mastodon and Pleroma (IIRC) don't yet support it.

Moving posts too would be nice, but significantly more complicated. I'm not a dev so I couldn't really speculate how much more difficult that would be, but IMHO for most people the current profile redirection and leaving posts on the old server is probably fine. It'd be nice to be able to publish old posts somehow in case that old server goes down entirely, but I think that's a bit more of an edge case that most people won't realistically be too concerned about. Moving your following you've amassed maybe over the span of years is far more critical though, and it annoys me that it is so uncommon outside of Mastodon specifically.

@Jonathanglick a standard migration process already exists for moving your follows/followers to your new account, it's just that pretty much everything besides Mastodon and Pleroma (IIRC) don't yet support it.

Moving posts too would be nice, but significantly more complicated. I'm not a dev so I couldn't really speculate how much more difficult that would be, but IMHO for most people the current profile redirection and leaving posts on the old server is probably fine. It'd be nice to be able to publish...

9 Feb 2023 at 18:21 | Open on mastodon.neat.computer
Jonathan Glick
foot long chili skottdog

@jonah @Jonathanglick Calckey has added support for migrating follows/followers. I don't believe it does posts, but at least it's another service supporting some form of migration.

9 Feb 2023 at 19:41 | Open on mastodon.social
clacke: looking for something πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡­πŸ‡°πŸ’™πŸ’›
@jonah @Jonathanglick Given that the URL is the identifier and the URL defines where the post is hosted, it is quite unclear what migrating posts would mean.

Reposting them in the new place, back-dated? Will I receive 10000 comments on old posts from years ago when someone I interacted with a lot moves? My comments on the original comments would still hang off the original comment anyway.

Should the original server redirect to the new post location? In the most important reason for moving posts, the original server closing down, this won't happen anyway.
@jonah @Jonathanglick Given that the URL is the identifier and the URL defines where the post is hosted, it is quite unclear what migrating posts would mean.

Reposting them in the new place, back-dated? Will I receive 10000 comments on old posts from years ago when someone I interacted with a lot moves? My comments on the original comments would still hang off the original comment anyway.
10 Feb 2023 at 9:17 | Open on libranet.de
Aswath Rao

@Jonathanglick @jonah In my opinion, the problem is less technical & more administrative. Off the cuff, permalink is artificial - we could have made it relative w anchor determined by user address. The bigger problem is from the new host. The admin has to moderate the old content in bulk for they can not depend on the old admin.

9 Feb 2023 at 18:23 | Open on mastodon.social
Jonah Aragon

@aswath I was thinking of permalinks posted on sites outside of the fediverse where they wouldn't be dynamically updated, but that certainly could be solved with redirects or something too. That's an interesting viewpoint though, that makes a lot of sense. Sounds like a moderation nightmare!
@Jonathanglick

9 Feb 2023 at 18:29 | Open on mastodon.neat.computer
DELETED

@jonah @codesmith not Akkoma? I presume it has the feature because it's very similar

9 Feb 2023 at 19:09 | Open on mstdn.social
Jonah Aragon

@nus Yeah, Mastodon/Pleroma forks probably do too.

9 Feb 2023 at 19:24 | Open on mastodon.neat.computer
DELETED

@jonah fwiw I just opened my Akkoma webapp to check, and it looks like I can import and export my Follow list no problem.

This feels like something that should be available through APIs on third-party web clients. Can't really confirm though. Surely Wildebeest should be compatible right?! Like... If you tried copying the web request for an export from a web console on a Mastodon server, you should be able to run it on Wildebeest too... Right?!

Settings Data import / export Follow import Import follows from a csv file Follow export
9 Feb 2023 at 19:35 | Open on mstdn.social
Jonah Aragon

@nus I don't have Wildebeest set up anymore so I can't check now. I was referring to migrating the people who follow you though, not the list of people who you follow, like this: docs.joinmastodon.org/user/mov

9 Feb 2023 at 19:40 | Open on mastodon.neat.computer
DELETED

@jonah okay, I have no idea whether Akkoma supports that. I looked through the other tabs and nothing hints at it... :blobcatsadlife:

9 Feb 2023 at 19:45 | Open on mstdn.social
Michael Veale

@nus @jonah akkoma does, it’s at the bottom of the security tab
10 Feb 2023 at 9:14 | Open on someone.elses.computer
Todd Vierling :verifiedenby:

@codesmith @jonah
To date, nobody has come up with a scheme for migrating content that would actually work in a way most people would expect it to work.

That's because most people would think of migrating content as bringing replies and other interaction with it, which is impossible because replies refer to the original post at the original instance. This is fundamental to the protocol.

There are ways to import your old content into some instance software. But they would show up as orphaned posts, disconnected from any interaction they previously had. This isn't something that a simple software change can fix.

@codesmith @jonah
To date, nobody has come up with a scheme for migrating content that would actually work in a way most people would expect it to work.

That's because most people would think of migrating content as bringing replies and other interaction with it, which is impossible because replies refer to the original post at the original instance. This is fundamental to the protocol.

10 Feb 2023 at 0:59 | Open on tech.lgbt
Codesmith

@ToddVierling @jonah Oh yeah 100% it would require a significant change in protocol. I'm not in the loop on lots of things and thought maybe there were discussions I had not found yet where this was actually being worked on. Turns out, no.

10 Feb 2023 at 1:09 | Open on techhub.social
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