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You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to anoth

You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread. I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

vidarh 4y ago
I have moved instances, so it made a practical difference to me. I also follow a lot of people who have moved instances and in all cases I only noticed because they posted about it (and hence there are probably more who have moved that I didn't notice). It needs improvements, such as the ability to move in spite of the old server (the ability to get at your private key so you or the new server can sign an assertion about the move with the old accounts key would be one option which would at least give people the choice of being prepared), and moving over the old posts (there are some stupid concerns about "faking timelines" which you can trivially do anyway, so I think this is a question of time to resolve that - it's not technically hard), but it already does offer significantly more freedom than Twitter.