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Comment by mathnmusic | Hacker News Reader

How do things stand on account portability? If I sign up at a mastodon server, build an audience and network there, but later if the server admin changes its policies in unfavorable directions, can I migrate to a new server with all my contacts and reputation intact - even without the old admin's cooperation?

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Mastodon has a "profile move" feature that moves all of your followers (on instances that support the protocol) to your new account. However, it will not move your toots (posts).

All of your account data can be exported, and everything except for toots (and media) can be imported.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

Post is called a toot? Tf

"Truth in advertising"

The bird app (Twitter) calls them tweets, so the Mastodon service decided to call them toots. But, they did rename them to "posts" earlier this year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26882318

I guess this isn't reflected in joinmastodon.org yet. Each instance can also choose to call posts whatever they want:

https://www.reddit.com/r/mastodon_social/comments/9mhzu8/how...

Long story short: Eugen didn't know toot had another meaning in some places. Toot is the sound a mastodon makes.

I only discovered the other meaning on the post they made about the renaming. For me it always was mastodon and trumpet sound

Yup -- either the devs don't know what that means in English slang, or they have a very juvenile sense of humor.

Either way, that alone seems like it would present a pretty serious obstacle to anyone taking Mastodon remotely seriously.

I'd argue that is a benefit. Imagine if people took Twitter and the Twitverse less seriously

Imagine a "Tweet to Fart" extension in the same vein as "Cloud to Butt". Lets see: "How could you refart that fart?! :angry_face: That's a terrible fart." Maybe I'm just juvenile but that might be funny enough to make twitter usable again.

In other words, I don't really mind "toot". It casts the medium with a healthy perspective on itself.

It's a benefit for society, but it's a big negative for the project. Twitter wouldn't be half as popular if it didn't stroke the egos of its users.

They recently stopped calling them toots (I liked the absurdity of it personally). Don't think that decision has made it through to the UI yet though.

Boo

> However, it will not move your toots (posts).

I would say that moving the posts is what worries me more about moving the account. I can refollow everyone, but I can't post hundreds (or thousands) of posts in their original datetime

Post migration is tracked in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423.

Hi, yes, you can move your followers to another account, and export/import other contacts. Perhaps not entirely without the old admin's cooperation though.

You can without the old admin's cooperation, but not if the old admin actively tries to stop you.

Honest question: is this something that is stopping you from joining/getting more active/build an audience?

If it is, have you considered running your own instance?

I run my own instance in a convoluted way - I added ActivityPub source and sink support to my own webapp. But every user deserves account portability, not just those who know how to deploy and maintain a Mastodon instance.

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