Mastodon's incomplete migration: manton.org
@manton Mastodon just needs a way to backdate and silence those posts, then the rest is easy for MarsEdit.
@manton Well thought out post. I felt exactly the same way about Mastodon.
I have my own instance, and I also use micro.blog and was “Syndicating” to my Mastodon instance.
But then, what is the point, when I can just use my own domain name and my fediverse identity created through Micro.blog? @samuel.
So I used the Migration tool on my Mastodon instance to let people know which account they should be following.
Yes, I lose my posts on the instance - but thankfully I’ve been using micro.blog for a while now and was cross-posting. Which means I have all the original posts still on my website and backed up to github and able to move where I wish, should I ever need to.
Owning your own content has never been more important than now.
@manton concerning backups. I do have the automatic GitHub mirror enabled. Can I use that to restore my blog again? Or would I best export a .bar file every now and again? Or would a theme and markdown zip be best to restore my micro.blog fully including theme?
@manton I’ve been thinking about this since reading your post. I didn’t realize all these issues existed with Mastodon, which has me wondering—should I abandon it or try something like Sharkey, which seems to address many of these problems? That said, Sharkey doesn’t appear to have widespread adoption yet.
I’m also not convinced that Bluesky is the answer. It doesn’t feel like the Twitter replacement we hoped for—at least, not like the pre-Musk Twitter that I really do miss.
Another thing I’ve been considering is whether Micro.blog would even support something like Sharkey if I made the switch. So, I’ve been doing a lot of pondering. Have I been wasting money running a single-user Mastodon instance that could be silenced without me even knowing it?
I still really like the core idea behind Mastodon. That’s what makes this all so frustrating.
@AlexKucera We don’t have an easy way to import the GitHub mirroring. I recommend doing an occasional .bar export and Markdown .zip too. The more you have, the more options you’ll have. I’d really like to add an automatic .bar export in the future.
@mlm361 In your position, I would stick with Mastodon for now. I don’t think all the compatibility issues with Micro.blog and Sharkey have been worked out. Bluesky has a lot of promise too and we’ll be doing more with it.
@slison I agree! Long term, I hope more people just have their own blog and ActivityPub tied together. Just more integrated and permanent that way.
@manton indeed. I haven’t been able to find any open source solutions available that allows that though and allows for self-hosting. Micro.blog is the closest thing. It would not be easy to just export out of Micro.blog and keep my fediverse identity going at the same time with all the backend work Micro.blog does on ActivityPub I think. Easy to keep the content, but not the fediverse side, timeline, follows etc.