 I migrated servers last week and boy did I develop some strong opinions about migration and the as-yet only semi-fulfilled promise of account portability. If you're thinking about moving instances—or you'd like to know yet more about my dreams for better networks—here's a post you might want to read: 120 comments
@Littlebobbytables I wanted a slightly sturdier server-level blocklist and to not have my following choices restricted by the beef between Stux and the Art admin. (If I weren't writing about tech, I'd probably have stayed, I think Stux is largely a great moderator, just a couple things off.)  @kissane @Littlebobbytables I’m starting to think it would be good to have a sort of psychogeographical map of the fediverse. I had no idea there was beef between Stux and Art (both moderators and neighbourhoods I like). Is there anyone covering this sort of news, either via micro or normal blog do you know? Seems important as one’s understanding of fedi grows more sophisticated. @kissane @Littlebobbytables Just finished reading your article and I see this is pretty much what you’re calling for.  @kissane Great article. 🎉 Still a fan of the fediverse and activitypub, but I have felt duped by the promise of simple and full portability as well. I do see some new ideas and processes for it being considered and built, but not from Mastodon directly that I know of? And nothing that a non-technical social media person would ever WANT to figure out.  @box464 @kissane Fediverse account portability between domains works a lot better than any other comparable protocol -- email, Web sites, XMPP. We don't even have to get into working with walled garden social networks. That's not the standard we should hold ourselves to. It can get a lot better, and it will, but let's give a little credit to the fact that it works at all.  Technical achievements aside, and at the risk of making devs feel bad about their great work, this stuff comes down to unmet expectations and broken promises. So much of the difficulties of federation are glossed over to the point that the image is that it’s all positives. Negative surprises are unappealing user experiences, especially amidst such an air of positivity. Maybe we need to readjust our needs re social media. But that’s not and unlikely to be the pitch.  Yeah, I feels like someone else I going to have to figure it out, be it a fork of mastodon or a completely different Activitypub network and mastodon starts losing users to it. At least ganking and modifying foss code for your own foss thing is fine at the philosophical level. Though it probably hurts feelings, especially depending on how credit is metted out. I ran into that one, and it actually kinda ruined mastodon for me. My first thought was to just rebuild but that wasn’t going well and eventually without these nice lists the feed was just confusing and I never got around to recreating them. There are some 3rd party tools apparently, but it was too late for me. Mastodon just became a sort of chaos, for better or worse. @kissane Not looking forward to this but, as my instance seems to be without anyone at the helm... @kissane Here's to hoping AP gets some inspiration from Zot protocol re: nomadic identity. 🤞
@lrhodes I had a couple grafs in there about exactly that but it got too long so I pulled them out for another post @kissane all this. everything you lose in an account migration gets glossed over, as if the transition were lossless. seems to be an odd taken-for-granted thing that you don't care about your old writing (for example). (also, just to check: you know you can cancel a redirect and fully reactivate an old account, after you migrate? took me a while to figure out, hence asking. I have an alt or two that live on post migration.) @hugo I know you can cancel, but I’m not clever enough for a full multiverse, myself—I should look into how that works, though @kissane 3 angles from my side: 1. The technician (sysadmin for many years) - There is certainly room for improvements but some "simple things" aren't simple to implement. 2. The open source enthusiast: The requests come from all sides and some might be iffy. What's good for, let's say, Meta, isn't good for me. 3. The user: I compare it to a pub. It's fleeting by nature. Best bits end up in a "notebook" elsewhere. I have 50+ followers, I can tell them where to find me when I move.  @petros @kissane Re the first item, it annoys me that Masto devs favour simplicity over the unsurprising. Ideally, you architect your system to have unsurprising behaviour. Failing that, you add some kind of adaptor layer to look unsurprising to users. Failing that, your docs (and UI!) should make it clear how the thing will surprise you. I know *so* much software doesn't do this, but every surprise sends such a message to Masto users... (You got me on a pet whinge, not targeted at you.) I am not sure what you are referring to. I see 2 categories: Sometimes something may surprise you in a way that should be fixed. I get that. Sometimes it is only surprising because people used abother platforms and expects it to work like what one used before. One can try to emulate the "before". That is quite exhausting. Or one does it differently and hope that people adapt. I am using a Linux desktop which will make Windows users frustrated. But Windows frustrates me a lot! @petros Well, the example from the OP is about account migration, which doesn't even exist on other platforms, so it's clearly in the first category. There are a good number of things that just don't make sense for normal social media use. e.g. If I reply to a followers-only post, only *my* followers (and named people) can see my reply. Anyone trying to follow the wider conversation with limited follows can't. This exposes the internal model at the cost of usefulness. @petros Having said all that, emulating the before is... complicated. There's value there - e.g. we've got posts, boosts, likes and bookmarks. Copying's not all bad - many features are the result of built-up experience that we shouldn't ignore. Just understand the feature first. The other side is that if you build something that looks suspiciously like a feature that exists on another platform *but behaves subtly differently* you're going to break expectations and make people sad. @petros My personal feeling is that these things should be thread-based - that whoever posts the original entry should kind-of own that space (although maybe it would be better to have clearer tools to separate sub-threads than just dropping the original owner). Given that, I'd default to "followers of original poster". Private block and follower lists complicate things. I think it would be possible with a layer of indirection, but messy. Much of this is effectively on an honour code anyway! @kissane Thank you. I've added your observations to my own list of migration caveats. @kissane Supposedly followers' lists losing migrators was fixed in May. I didn't see it in the changelog of released versions. Yet? @kissane great read, and great choice of typefaces — I *thought* I recognized Valkyrie; it’s the font I use on my own site and I’ve been staring it a lot lately @kissane Seems to me that some of these issues could be solved by abstracting (if that's the correct term) the account name - my first thought is that we need something that is _just_ an identity server. Then when we create a user identity on a system, we point to the ID on that server and say 'this is me'. eveyrthing creared would use the identity on that system but it would resolve to that ID on the identity server. So your conversations wouldn't ever be referencing your 'dead identity' @TimHare Yeah, there are a few proposals floating around for handling identity as it’s own layer—obviously tweaking something as widely used as ActivityPub isn’t a joke, but I hope there’s room for evolution That is really useful information! Thank you! 🤔 (I had no idea about the DMs aspect!! 😯 ) Also the list thing really bugs me. I have not tried migrating, but many people I follow have. It's hard to keep lists, because people drop off when they move, and there is not even a record of what list to put them back into! 🤦♀️ @kissane After migrating twice, I can confirm every single problem described in the linked article.   @kissane this is a really informative and well-written article, thank you. I didn't know you'd lose the things you listed and I think the suggestions were very practical. I hope the right people read and follow through on it. @kissane Great post! I also migrated servers recently and one thing not mentioned in your post that I was a little surprised by at first was that my profile photo and bio didn’t port. Not a huge deal but I just wasn’t expecting it. @kissane Really enjoyed reading this. I’ve also been considering a potential move, including setting up an account on Calckey/Firefish to explore it as an option. But I think you did a great job outlining what people need to consider as well as how we could improve things for present and future users. @kissane So much useful stuff here - I'd love to get it into the Github issues, not so much as I believe it would get quickly fixed, so much as making sure it's not unknown/unrecognised. Would it be ok to link the page, or transfer the concerns anonymously to avoid any blowback, or maybe something else? @sgf Oh no worries, go for it, with my thanks. If I had a tiny bit more time, I’d be logging issues and working on docs myself! @kissane thank you for writing this, I’m pondering a move so it was very timely. One thing I don’t understand though is how I will know if any of my mutuals are on a server that wouldn’t be visible if I moved to a new one.  @kissane I realized when I moved instances, that the other server I was using wasn't found by this instance, despite having already followed people from the other instance, so I had to manually refollow everyone I wanted to keep up with, some of them refollowed, some have not.  @kissane @AbandonedAmerica yuuup to all this! Plus there’s a decent chance many of your followers won’t be migrated if there’s any hitch in the protocol. It doesn’t appear to retry either. @kissane so, data migration works waaaaaaay better on the Web if you own your own domain. I'd compare moving your WordPress blog from one service to another. You download the data, upload it to the new installation, change the DNS, and shit just works. You can do about the same thing with a single-user Mastodon instance right now. It would be cool if you could do it with other server software: make a backup from your 1-user Masto, and restore it to your 1-user Calckey. Change the DNS, and it just works. @kissane this is, obviously, how Blue Sky data portability works. Everyone gets a DNS name for their identity. And they move around as needed. @kissane all of which is to say: 1) We should be encouraging people to get their own domain early in the onboarding process. 2) Fediverse software should support bringing your own domain. Takahē does it; others should follow suit. 3) Fediverse software should support both Webfinger accounts (user@domain.example) and DNS hostname accounts (user.domain.example). That way, everyone gets a domain name, free, right away, but somewhat less under their own control. @kissane I know that domains have their weaknesses as a root of identity on the Web and the social web. They've also proved remarkably resilient over the last 30+ years of civilian Internet. There are some other identity systems, like DIDs, that can supplement DNS, but right now, owning a domain is the best way to control your internet identity.  @evan I’d love it if cosocial allows me to use my own domain. I guess we wouldn’t be a community then though? @emd @evan I highly recommend @mastohost I’d you want a painless way of self hosting and using your own domain. My server is almost single user (I mean I have like 4 friends on it) because there was no way I’d have my main account on a domain I don’t control, just like email. @g @evan @mastohost ya I thought about that but wanted to join a community, and one that is member supported (my instance is a co-op model). But I’d love to own my own identity on here. @emd @evan Normally, I’d be on @jerry’s awesome instance, but I wanted to control my domain. I interact with people from that instance non stop, I don’t feel like I’m less part of the community. I guess some features are a bit pointless though like if I look at all my local server posts etc and it’s tumbleweeds @evan @kissane I’ve long been under the impression that if you use a domain once it basically gets burned because of the public key caching that happens across the fediverse and that you can’t then spin up another instance on the same domain. I do have the advantage of having been able to move my self-hosted instance between hosts without data loss and minimal downtime though. @evan This will sound snarky, but please believe it’s not: I think that’s great for people with the wherewithal and knowledge and connections into admin peer support and who also don’t mind their replies not showing up in lots of people’s view. I think it is a laudable accomplishment! But it’s also a niche activity compared to the mass of people who just want to use Mastodon (or something else) to hang out with their friends. And rn Masto tells those people accounts are portable 🫠 @kissane I will say this with the utmost respect: you are the fediverse critic whose voice I trust the most. I know you really want it to succeed, and you point out problems that we all want to overlook. Data portability is a big deal, and I'd like to see it get better. I also think the ghost replies issue is a big deal that we need to fix. There are tools in AP that Mastodon doesn't use. I'd like to figure out why and get them working.  @evan Thanks, Evan, that's very kind. I'm muting a lot of stuff for a bit, but I appreciate that you're engaging on these topics. @evan do you have any pointers on how Mastodon could better employ AP on the visibility issues, to make advocacy easier?  @kissane You can't even export followed hashtags, which really bugged me when I migrated few days ago.  @kissane Excellent post. 👏 “To begin with, the best time to move from one home server to another (“migrate instances”) on Mastodon is never. The second-best time is as soon as possible, because the longer you wait, the more you stand to lose in. But until you’ve been on Mastodon for a while, you aren’t going to know how well you get along with your server’s mod policy and administrators, and how your server’s reputation will affect your experience. It’s not ideal!” Dilemma for small instances @kissane Something like your suggestion, One risk I see though is that something simple that is adopted by everyone will lead to cascade blocking of instances based on relatively little evidence. Such systems need to be fed by actual experiences of admins/mods and not just a big chain of “you block so I block”.  @kissane I've always wondered what would happen if you migrated to your own Mastodon server, and then replaced references of the old account with your new account in the posts export, and then manually inserted them into your own database and/or sidekiq. @kissane Like would those posts get federated at all. Would they show up as duplicate replies in threads, etc.? @kissane literally just saw this posted on Lemmy. This is a great read and you informed me of some things I wasn't previously aware of. Early on, I "migrated" from mastodon.social to mstdn.social and it was like starting over from scratch. @kissane excellent read!!! This is something I will bookmark and pin to my account for later use! 💜 @kissane @kissane Good article, that. I had to move instances and fingers crossed I won't need to do it again. @kissane the solution is to eliminate servers, provide #p2p services and apps. Servers and fedi are a lifeboat, p2p will be the shore ➡️ #SafeNetwork @kissane I recently changed instances as well, so I feel your pain. I wanted a server that had Markdown support, so I migrated to a GlitchSoc server. I feel a little bad about it, because my former instance admin was cool and was going through a rough time with drama from another server, so I hope he doesn't think I left over that. But the instance just wasn't meeting my needs. @kissane I migrated to a new user name (on the same server) and experienced many of the brain-splinters you did. The challenges of server selection in the AP/Mastodon/Fed system seem architectural. It is going to need a lot of both thinking and work for Normal Humans who don’t think about this kind of stuff all day every day to adopt. @kissane There is a GitHub feature request to notify users when relations would sever due to defederation. I think it would go a long way towards alleviating some of the uncertainty around migration. @kissane fantastic post. i hope the mastodon and other fedi software devs take note of it. this is one of the things that is really clunky in ways that are hard for even technical users to understand @kissane this is amazing! I was thinking about this problem and wondered how difficult it might be, but I don't want to be locked into an instance.  @kissane Even as an admin moving on my own server from one username to another, I _still_ had to kick the CLI to re-play the migration for my followers to actually re-follow automagically. It only got like 150 of them in the initial one. Gave me considerable empathy for folks migrating and struggling. I'm hopeful any of my users will let me know if they plan to so I can help if I need to re-run their migration to their new instance. And have nudged a couple admins to help too just...cause it sucks that much. @kissane@mas.to Thank you for this post! And filters were not automatically transferred either when I moved. @kissane Good write-up. There a couple of things I hadn't even realised when I migrated an account last year. One thing I noticed during the migration that is not on your list is that there no way to migrate personal notes either (which I found useful to keep track of how I knew people).  @kissane This is excellent, thank you for recording it. Another issue that bit me while migrating off of qoto.org is the migration requires your new address to reference your old address as an alias, and after you set that up it can take up to 24 hours for the cache at your old server to refresh data on your new user that allows it to complete the migration. It's a minor irritant, but it should be very fixable. @kissane The current set of Fediverse protocols *partially* solves migration. Or to quote myself "This is definitely *better*, but is it good enough? Is it how it should be?" (rhetorical question, as migration is one of the major Fediverse selling points, the answer is "no") https://jaxroam.vivaldi.net/2022/11/19/changes-of-address/ Far as I can tell there is no specification for user migration, what a conforming application and servers running it must do to enable this, and we need that. |
Gregory's Server
@kissane that bit about "identity, conversation, and portability" is pure fire.