Notices by Frederick (fooderick@social.nerd.net)

@Fox @Tipa @shalien @me

Hmm yes. That is a great point. I believe that I’ve also seen something similar brought up in that GitHub Issue for Mastodon a long time ago, but alas, I just got off work and I haven’t had a chance to update myself. Consistency is /quite/ a tough problem, if not one of the toughest to be able to viably solve.

On the other hand, I think that perhaps a bad implementation might be acceptable if done well. We would never be able to resolve/rewrite external links, nor be able to effectively rewrite history outside of an instance. I think it would be possible to migrate /some/ things, even if it’s not everything. Breaking some things (e.g. ignoring replies) makes even more sense when considering a host instance disappearing entirely.

There are tradeoffs of course, and right now I am severely ignorant anyway. I have no educated solutions to this barrier to entry.

Also I linked to your reply in a reply here :) :
https://social.nerd.net/@fooderick/111825715301093492

@Tipa @shalien @me I lied. I found the GitHub issue. But I don’t have time to read it right now. It seems like it was last commented on October 2023, so it seems like there is some movement. But personally I think that this is a truly necessary change for Mastodon/The Fediverse. I frankly don’t think it is viable as it currently stands without this.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

@Tipa @shalien @me You _can_ export your Mastodon posts into a ZIP file. It should at https://<your-instance>/settings/export. It exports into an ActivityPub format which could definitely be translated into other mediums.

My bigger issues is that you cannot transfer your posts between Mastodon instances. If I had to shut down my instance, all of my user’s posts would die along with it. They could export their data, but they would have to set up their own blog, import data, etc… They could also throw it on The Internet Archive, but that’s not a good solution either.

What I would like is when you migrate your account to another instance, it would also migrates your posts in addition to your followers/following. There is a GitHub issue somewhere that explains why such an implementation is infeasible in Mastodon, but I don’t have time right now to find it. I believe it had to do with UUIDs, which seems a bit silly to me.

@shalien @me @Tipa My biggest complaint about the Fediverse, but more specifically Mastodon, is the *inability* to own your data. It is bizarre to me that there still isn’t already robust support for migrating posts between accounts/servers.

I feel like I can’t recommend Mastodon to my friends because while they can probably trust that Facebook or Twitter/X won’t disappear overnight, Mastodon/Fediverse instances shut down All. The. Time. I don’t want to have my friends lose their data because of some false narrative of owning it here. Even on my own instance…

While I don’t use it or agree with all of it, one thing that Bluesky/AT was trying to solve was disentangling user data with the home server. While I don’t think their implementation is necessarily accessible to most users, it shocks me that there is not an equivalent for Fediverse/Mastodon migrations.