Moving House: Simplifying Fedi Migrations

I like to think of the Fediverse in terms of Neighborhoods for easier conceptualization. As a quick refresher if you didn’t go read that previous link, for the purposes of this discussion I think of things this way:

• Account = house
• Instance = neighborhoods/cities/individual islands
• Federated Instances = island chains/archipelagos/ryu-kyus/keys

There are two main paradigms with which most people view the Fedi - the “we are all one” view and the “archipelago” perspective. Without going into too much detail and digression, the semantic difference between these two is that in the former case, it doesn’t really matter what local instance you’re on and in the latter, the local instance you choose to primarily “live” on is more important.

Personally, I am an “archipelagist”, if I might coin a term.

I bring this up because it gives rise to the differences between alternate accounts (“alts”) and migrations (“mains”). When instances are less important to a person, they might tend to create various alts to essentially “split their personality construct” and segregate their thoughts into different areas and keep them separate (for example, personal and professional alts for folks) with roughly equal weight - think of it as owning multiple homes in different areas. Those that prize their “home” instance, on the other hand, while they might have 1 or 2 alts, will also be more likely to migrate their main to different servers for whatever reason because that’s where they spend most of their time “living”.

Creating alts is pretty easy to conceptualize; migration less so. And thus, the reason for this article.

Moving House

Why would someone want to migrate? Well, for the same reasons that they might want to move to another neighborhood - they align more with the rules, customs, and social structures of the new subdivision, they found a house design that they like better, they have grown out of their previous house, etc., etc., etc. In Fediverse terms, maybe that neighborhood is going away because the instance is going down for whatever reason, or has been defederated by all the others.

So just like a house, migrating your account to another instance is just like moving to another neighborhood with all the actions that entails - things like getting rid of stuff you can’t fit into the new house, forwarding your mail, changing your address, etc. And sadly, depending on who your “home builder” is (the platform your instance runs - Mastodon, Akkoma, Pixelfed, etc.), the process can be more manual than automatic.

Let me first say that I haven’t actually done this myself. As an “archipelagist”, I have a main with a couple of alts on related servers (“sister instances”, if you will) mainly to hold my handle in communities that are tangentially familiar with my main handle. I use them mainly for backup or to separate some of my personal concerns, if it ever comes to that. So the explanation below will be a little bit academic and you’ll definitely want to do further research yourself based on the instance type you’re coming from and the one you’re migrating to for specifics.

The Process

In layman’s terms, the process goes like this: find a new neighborhood, buy a house, forward all your mail, change your address, and then move in. For more specifics (with pictures!), keep on readin’.

Step 1 is to find a new home instance and then create a new account there. This is akin to buying a new house in a new neighborhood. Pick a community that most closely shares your values and has rules that you are willing to abide by (these rules can usually be found on the “About” page of a fediverse instance). For further “house hunting”, you can browse the Local timeline of your desired instance (if it’s publicly available). For me personally, being on an instance with a majority of “locals” that I vibe with is the most important thing for me. I want to join a community of like-minded individuals, not just some random instance. Then apply and create a new account. Congratulations on your new house!

Step 2 is to backup/export your follows, followers, and posts to somewhere safe so that you can import that information into your new main. And just to clarify and differentiate the above terms:

• Follows are the accounts that you are following from your account (like magazine subscriptions that need to be informed of your new address so you keep getting your magazines)
• Followers are other accounts that follow your account (friends and businesses that need to know your new address)
• Posts are toots and replies that you have made from that instance under your “old” account (like the furniture in your house)

Most instance types will allow you to export these three things individually into files that you can save on your computer and then, in some cases, import into your new home after the migration is complete.

Not Everything Can Be Imported!

To the best of my knowledge, no instance type will allow the import of posts from another instance. There are various reasons for this, but as far as I know, migration means that you will lose these original posts (or rather, they will be left on the “old” instance and account). Basically, you’re moving to a new house but you can’t bring your furniture along. But, there are some ways to get around this which I discuss below.

Some instance types allow you to import your Followers list but most do not. The standard Fediverse remedy for this is setting up account/instance aliases, which are covered below. This can be further complicated if you have the “manually approve follow requests” setting turned on for your new account. As I have no personal experience with this, I’m going to say that you’ll want to try to find more information on this yourself.

And finally, I think every instance type WILL allow you to import your Follows list. However, this will generate new follow requests that need to be acknowledged by the owner if they have their “manually approve follow requests” setting turned on. This is just a bit of warning that this action will generate a bunch of follow requests and that it might take those external folks some time to approve them.

Step The Next is, once your new account is setup and active on your new instance, go back to your old instance and setup an “alias” to the new account. This is essentially like forwarding your mail. When you do this, it will send out a message to all of your followers (at least on some platforms) that you’ve moved and where your new “main” account is located, and it will automatically generate follow requests that you’ll need to approve (I think) if you have “manually accept follow requests” turned on. In this case, my suggestion would be to not enable that feature until after the migration is complete.

On Mastodon, these settings can be found in Preferences > Account > Account settings

and look like this:

So, there’s one link if you’re moving FROM Mastodon to another instance and a different link to create an alias if you’re moving TO Mastodon from another instance. If you’re moving AWAY from your mastodon account, here’s what that “configure it here” screen looks like, which tells you what happens to your “old” account as a result of the migration:

By way of example, here’s what the migration panel looks like on an Akkoma instance, which can be found in Settings > Security:

So, using these examples above, if I was going to move FROM Mastodon TO Akkoma, the process looks like this:

1. On the Akkoma instance, setup an alias in the “Account Aliases” section that matches my Mastodon instance information (e.g. myuser@myoldserver.whatever)
2. On the Mastodon instance, I would click that “configure it now” link and fill out the information for my “new” instance
3. I would then click the “Move Followers” button which would then set off the chain of actions described on that page in orange
4. I would then go to my Akkoma account and import my Follows from the backup I made right before the migration

Alternatively, if I was moving TO Mastodon FROM Akkoma, the process would look like this:

1. On the Mastodon instance, I would click that “create an account alias” link and fill in the information that matches my Akkoma instance information
2. On the Akkoma instance, I would fill in the information required about my Mastodon account in the “Move Account” section
3. I would then click the “Save Changes” button which would launch similar actions to Mastodon
4. Now import my Follows from the Akkoma account into Mastodon

This can be a good way to also clean out one’s contact list of old accounts that no longer exist, or were setup to approve followers but have since been abandoned. :)

Now, you’re finally ready to start making your new instance/house your “home”!

But What About My Posts?

“But I like my furniture! I don’t want to leave it behind! Isn’t there anything I can do to keep it?”

Well, automatically speaking, no. There have been some instance type maintainers that were working on the possibility of importing old posts, but it turns out that’s fairly difficult based on the vagaries of the ActivityPub protocol. So on that front, you’re gonna be out of luck, Chuck.

HOWEVER - and I haven’t tried this myself, so use at your own risk - what you might try is boosting some of your more important toots in your old account from your new one before you migrate. I’m not sure what happens when your account becomes “inactive” post-migration, and what that means for posts that were boosted or replied to. There’s a good chance that they might become inaccessible once the migration is done, so this might not be a valid solution.

The only other way that I know of at this time would be to copy pasta your most important or prized toots from the old account into the new account and post them afresh. You’ll lose all of your interactions, of course, but at least the content will be preserved for you to look at, will be associated with your main, and it can still be found in searches and whatnot. I would definitely do this with any pinned toots that you have on your old account, unless you really don’t want them anymore. You’ll probably get weary of doing this pretty quickly, so I’d suggest only doing it for your most important toots.

Other than that, your old posts are stuck with your old account. That’s the biggest downside of migration. Just think of it like moving house with a “scorched earth” policy. You’re moving your most important pieces of furniture into the new house and leaving the rest of it behind and starting fresh with new furniture that fits the new house.

And this is also where I advocate for using the “automatic post deletion” feature that a lot of instances have available. Unless social media is your literal livelihood or an inextricable part of your job, I would encourage most folks to not keep old posts around for much longer than 6 months (or shorter, even). Let’s face it - most of us never go back and read our old posts after more than a few months and it’s also likely that their shelf-life is also extremely limited. Plus, the fewer posts you keep around, the less you have to lose when you migrate because you’re already thinking about them as being ephemeral. And, in the fight against surveillance capitalism, it helps to keep your personal history out of the all-seeing eyes of the internet scrapers.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. Migrations aren’t exactly easy, but they’re also not infuriatingly hard. There will be some hiccups along the way, you can be sure. But for the most part, if you view it just like you view moving physical locations, it becomes a lot easier to understand. Hopefully my way of perceiving this activity has helped make it easier for you to understand and maybe a little less scary to contemplate. I feel that it’s important to find the right instance for you, and migration shouldn’t be a reason to prevent people from finding their “forever home” (as long as that lasts).

Good luck out there, snowbirds! Find your homes!