People 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?

submitted by Blaze (he/him) edited

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?

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Zaktor

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.

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Avatar aasatru

Yeah, sure. But then again everyone should aim to behave in a way where it doesn't take goodwill not to ban them - especially here, where you might be banned from some instances but not others, and never even know it.

In that sense, if you were to migrate your profile, your bans should also migrate with you.

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Zaktor

I think there's gray areas where someone comes in hot to play devil's advocate and if they have a history that looks like a normal contrarian person elsewhere they might just get a removal and/or a warning, but if they're a 2 day old account with 5 one word comments, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Granted, you shouldn't expect mods to try to figure out your personal history and state of mind to know you weren't trying to troll in your very first post in their community, but it's at least something to try to sort out those gray area comments. Or something to review if the user appeals their ban.

And yeah, taking your bans with you in migration would be the cost of maintaining that history. It's a commitment to owning your own posts and history.

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