FOSSDLE PieFedPeople say Mastodon migration is better than Lemmy's, but their documentation says "Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations", am I missing something?
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Blaze (he/him)
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I've seen a few comments in the other thread about community centrization
Your following, blocking, muting, and domain-blocking lists can be imported at Settings > Import, where they can either be merged or overwritten.
Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export
Seems pretty similar to the way we manage it with Lemmy at the moment (settings menu, export JSON, import JSON), am I missing something?
Mastodon has a redirect. I believe that's the only thing missing.
Thanks. I guess at the moment people manually redirect using pinned posts in communities and in their old profile bio.
On Mastodon it's all about who you're following and who you're being followed by, so being able to move somewhere else and take your followers with you is a big deal.
On the Threadiverse we don't really follow users so much, so the whole concept of account migration becomes very different. Migration of communities rather than of users would probably be the best parallel - it would be great if subscribers could automatically follow a migrating community without having to manually resubscribe.
I see. On the other hand, I've done it a few times (you announce it beforehand, create the new community, lock the old community with a pinned post) and it's usually okay. Not ideal of course, but still not a breaking point.
The argument I've seen a few times is that "communities should be able to move all of their posts and comments elsewhere, on Mastodon it's possible", but it doesn't seem to be the case from the OP.
Ah yeah, it's not possible on Mastodon either. Your content stays where it is.
I think it's even less of a problem on the Threadiverse than it is on Mastodon though. Most people are interested in new content here, we rarely go digging too much through the archives. Though it would of course be neat.
From experience moderating on Reddit, user histories were pretty useful in judging whether they just made a mistake or were ban evading or trolling. If a fresh account drops in with a trollish comment as their first interaction with the community, they might just catch a ban rather than being treated as a good faith poster who came in too hot and deserves a second chance.
So if you migrate accounts in Lemmy, you'll have to pay that price over again and risk more strict moderation because you have no history, whereas a Mastodon-like link to their previous account would establish a baseline.
Not for day to day use, but the main value reddit had was because of good information posted there. I hope Lemmy could replace reddit on that matter too. So when you need to search for something online you could use the fediverse as a good source instead of proprietary sites.
I believe there is some tenuous support for this in the underlying ActivityPub protocol but it's not really implemented by anyone afaik. I'm not sure if the protocol makes it easy.
If Lemmy, Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps supported protocol-level moving, you could in theory even move from Lemmy to Mastodon or vice versa, and not just from one app to the same app on a different instance.
I feel like we would have colonized Mars before this would happen.
Well, maybe with Lemmy and Mastodon. If I recall correctly, both Lemmy and Mastodon started as separate projects that then only later tacked on ActivityPub support. I am by no means an expert in ActivityPub, but I believe this approach of only adding it on later may have made things more complicated. It's possible that a newer alternative that was built with federated protocols in mind from the start would have an easier time (this is mostly just speculation from my part).
I suppose there is unfortunately also little motivation for supporting protocol-level moving, as it allows people to move entirely away from your software, which developers don't want as they rely on donations from the users. Although it obviously also allows users to move to your software so... 🤔
Mars seems closer after reading your comment 😄
Mars is currently getting closer to the Earth in their orbits, so this may be both figuratively and literally true.
But yea it's hard. Federated social media is by definition a harder problem than centralized ones. It's more flexible and malleable, but building such systems is always a mess.
Also (sorry, this is getting anecdotal again), I recently read up on the inner workings of ActivityPub and uuh... I gotta say I am actively disheartened by its complexity. It is an exceedingly flexible protocol, but that flexibility comes at a very high complexity cost. I am not convinvced it is as simple as it could have been, unfortunately.
There's a bit more on Mastodon then Lemmy - https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration has the details. But not being able to move posts is a big limitation. And even the functionality that's implemented has some unpleasant surprises -- see https://erinkissane.com/notes-from-a-mastodon-migration
Mastodon moves also take your following with you. You'll still have to reimport followers, but you don't lose your ""audience"".
There are software out there (Sharkey for microblogging (Firefish also had it but theirs was broken and leaked DMs), PixelFed for images from Instagram specifically) that allow some form of post imports, but these are only brand new posts that happen to have the same content as the old ones, and not "replacing the author of a post".
There are work going on regarding nomadic identity and more seamless account migrations across instances, but hell will freeze over before any of the mainstream fedi software implement anything close to that, mainly due to how significant of a conceptual change that is.