Image by hvprint from Pixabay

The holy grail of decentralized social media is something called portability or, sometimes, nomadic identity. The idea is that at any moment, you can migrade your everything to another server / instance. Posts, attachments, relationships.

We're not there yet but some Fediverse platforms are a little closer to there than others. This isn't a guide. It's me talking about some comparable experiences.

Mastodon as the baseline

Federated blogging has been around for a while. I first got interested in it when the only option was Diaspora. In practice, my options to join were ... host my own. That wasn't something I was in a position to do at the time. When I became aware of Mastodon, I hopped right into it. One of the advantages was that there were servers you could join.

That's probably more history than is really needed here so I'll leave that where it is.

When you migrate an account from one Mastodon server to another, you must first sign up on the new server. Then, on the old server, you tell it to migrate you to the new one. From the new one, you tell it to migrate from the old one.

If everything goes right, your followers get ported over to the new server. Anyone who goes to the old account still sees the old account but they get a banner telling them that you've moved to the new one.

Nothing else is done at all. In fact, while your followers (mostly) migrated to the new server, you are not following anyone on the new account. You have to export your followers on the old server and import them on the new one. Your posts aren't gone — they're still out there on the old account — but they sure as hell didn't come with you.

This is a stressful and traumatic experience for everyone. You can find guides out there and there are third party utilities that may allow you to sort of import your posts from the old server to the new one.

It's not good.

How Sharkey is different

I'm a big fan of Sharkey. It's a fork of Misskey and I feel like it's mostly better software than Mastodon. Even if you're not interested in federated microblogging, it's a pretty good platform for building small communities with.

The process to migrate one account to another starts pretty similarly, though. You go to the old account, you tell it to forward to the new one. You go to the new account and tell it to receive the forwarding from the old one. Your followers (mostly) get redirected to the new account.

Your follows don't come and your posts don't come either. Just like Mastodon, you can import your old followers list. However! That's not the end of the story. You have the option to import your posts. It comes with the post attachments too.

Even if you're coming from Mastodon, you can bring your posts along with you. I did this previously when I moved my memes account from a Vanilla Mastodon server to a Sharkey server. But now I've done it from a Sharkey server to another Sharkey server.

It would be nice if it wasn't necessary to do additional exports and imports in order to finish the job ... but you can finish the job on Sharkey.

You can't even get half-way there when you're doing a Mastodon-to-Mastodon migration.

Should social media be ephemeral?

I'm not going to wax long on this point. It shouldn't be the platform's decision whether social media is ephemeral. It should be the account owner's decision. In some ways, Mastodon supports that. You can set up posts to automatically delete if you want to.

You can't choose not to have your posts disappear into the ether when your instance goes down.

That shouldn't be John Mastodon's decision to make. It should be yours.

Sharkey (and others) give you that decision back.

It's time that Mastodon caught up.

Buy my stuff please!

#Fediverse #Mastodon #Technology