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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 ‘Fediverse?’

9 Feb 2023 at 18:16 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mstdn.social
7 comments
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 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛
@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
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