What exactly do you mean? I migrated from one instance to another without problem, and all my followers/followings came over without an issue.
Of course keeping your followers is important. But having a new empty wall was a real problem for me.
I didn't know it. Nobody told me, from the people to the interface that I would lose my 3500 messages. It's like having your blog content on another domain in the hands of another host, that can shut your old page down when he wants.
It's the perfect walled garden in terms of content.
Also, the instance where I was had its backup feature down for months. Finally, the followers migration failed at 80 %.
> On this page you can also download a copy of your archive that can be read by any ActivityPub software. This archive includes all of your posts and media. So even if the instance that you are moving from shuts down, as is the case with KNZK, you will still have a copy of all of your posts!
Sure, being able to get an archive is nice.
If the lack of import is caused by policy conflict or cost for administrators to review bulk-imported content, does this encourage individuals to have a paid instance to aggregate historical content, e.g. https://masto.host.
A couple of solutions: (a) post them on a website and put a link in your new Mastodon profile, or (b) use something like mastodon.py https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html to post them to your new account.
Does the old server redirect to your new account if someone linked to your old post(s) from somewhere else?
I can totally see instance admins denying a transfer after banning you (because if they banned you they probably would like to punish you further).
Also, no GIF support. I asked the admin if he was wanting to get my help, or some funds to help for the servers. Said no.
Imagine : to get GIF support by switching instance, I would lose my posts.
After I did the migration, we talked, the backup worked again.
Couldn't even see his answers nor thank him, since once the migration is acted you lose access to your past discussions.
Disclosure : my account was censored, I did not respect one of the "laws" specific to the instance.
In the early 2000s, hackers were staunch defenders of free speech. The internet was a safe space from an often conservative and religiously Puritanical "meat space".
Now that the pendulum has swung, a majority seemingly wants to shut down the things and the people that they disagree with. Moreover, the accepted social behavior encourages this kind of hate and range and spite. It's even been gamified.
In many ways, the future turned out a lot worse than I'd hoped for. This is certainly one of the things I loathe.
But here's the deal: while I can and do moderate what passes through my server, there's absolutely nothing I can do about how you run yours. I'm not telling anyone they can't say certain things. I'm telling them they need to say it somewhere else.
By analogy, it's probably closer to a message board. If I were running a board for physicists, I feel absolutely zero obligation to allow crackpots to post anti-science nonsense and yell at the scientists there. They can go make their own message board, or Mastodon instance, if they want to say those things.
There is always going to be some percentage of interest overlap between users that gets destroyed by federated moderation. It's too coarse grained and ruins the decentralized possibilities of the internet.
That isn't to say that users shouldn't be able to filter out whatever they dislike. Rather, it would be best if that was a user's choice [1].
I participate in LGBT spaces, but I'm not going to block people for playing Harry Potter. I don't appreciate people stepping in my way to censor things they think I shouldn't see or hear.
To make an analogy with Reddit, if I make a comment in r/conservative (without necessarily even subscribing to their ideology), I get banned from dozens of other subreddits via automated moderation tools. That's a lot like how Mastodon thinks the world should work. But that's not how people are or should be.
Mastodon (and subreddit mods) think everyone should wear a membership pin or be emblazoned with a Scarlet Letter. That's incredibly harmful to people and is leading to increasing polarization in society.
[1] I'm sure that could even be done at scale by subscribing to community block lists. It shouldn't be a hassle, it just shouldn't be centrally planned and executed with no recourse from the end users.
People romanticize that time way more than it deserves.
I’m not a fan of censorship, but there’s a case to be made for reasonable adults deciding the ground rules. Case in point: Twitter.
Eehhh speak for yourself. I wish the young generation could experience the free and open and wild Internet that I did in the 90s and 00s...
Now they're stuck with ~10 websites run by giant megacorporations and "adults deciding the ground rules"...
Give the kids some credit, they're smarter than you think..
Those were exhilarating and heady times for many teenagers and children, to be sure, but you don't have any children of your own, do you?
This is the fucked up problem with federation and it's why we need true peer-to-peer social media.
Instead of corporate ideological kowtowing, now it's a thousand little fiefdoms of tiny tyrants deciding if you pattern fit to the ascribed dogma.
Your profile includes your posts and all your data, and you are free to move it around, back it up, host it wherever you want, etc... But all the posts are federated together.
I haven't looked at it closely in a while but I know they're still growing slowly but steadily..
I believe for retaining content it's pretty much retaining it for yourself by downloading an archive, though some instances may allow uploading that. There's also at least one browser-based web app that lets you open and view the content of that archive - otherwise it's kind of useless.
Yes of course I'm getting the technical and conceptual difficulties as a developer, but it's awful UX. It's a real deal breaker once you discover it. You cannot use Mastodon as your primary content database anymore.
But I do agree UX could and should be better
It’s best to assume anything you don’t host yourself is ephemeral.