Getting active on Mastodon

Sunday, December 12, 2021 (11:23)

Yesterday I started to use my account lucsaffre@mastodon.online by posting miscellaneous spontaneous things. But before getting used to it, I tried to fix a little problem: I feel that the name “Mastodon” is an unfortunate choice. So I created a new account lucsaffre@climatejustice.social on a server with a less ugly name. And then I tried to migrate from the old to the new account.

How to migrate from one server to another

I requested an archive of my posts and uploaded media. It was in a file archive-20211212102746-c6d0ac3e88bd2ad90e715de093b9aec3.tar.gz, which is in the ActivityPub format, which should be readable by any compliant software. Note that you can request an archive only once every 7 days–for understandable reasons.

But then, on the new server, I tried to import that data. Especially my posts. But either I am stupid or it doesn’t work, it always says “We’re sorry, but something went wrong on our end.”

So while it is easy to migrate to another server with all your account data (friends, followers, bookmarks…), your posts (including media files) cannot move. This even makes some sense now that I think about it: my posts can be a lot of data, and they are published on the Internet with an URL.

Conclusion: I will remain on mastodon.online and probably even delete my account on climatejustice.social (because I avoid using two names for a same thing).