4 ms·

Porting accounts is very much not well supported. You can move the account but moving the messages/followers/following and other data is very much hit and miss.

by zaphar 3y ago

Porting accounts is very much not well supported. You can move the account but moving the messages/followers/following and other data is very much hit and miss. The protocol doesn't support that part. Bluesky's protocol has built in support for porting the entire account including all the data. It's protocol is also better suited for it.

tedunangst 3y ago
Where can I port my data to using bluesky?
- wmf 3y ago
  Anywhere, once Bluesky is out of beta.
  - smithcoin 3y ago
    Seems pretty obtuse no?
    - josephg 3y ago
      Obtuse? It’s still in private beta. If it’s obtuse, that’s by design. They need time to figure out how the protocol should work before other implementations exist. Once an ecosystem of clients and servers appears, it will become very hard to change core details of the protocol.
vidarh 3y ago
Mastodon very much supports moving followers/following. Not all others do, but the mechanism is well established. It does not yet support moving posts (it supports exporting them, but there's no import mechanism short of an admin manually doing a database import), but there's nothing that makes adding that technically difficult - it's down to coming to agreement about how to do it. That Bluesky in theory supports it is pretty irrelevant until they open up federation.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Since its a common ask I wonder why Mastodon has not implemeneted it yet...
  - vidarh 3y ago
    They've in the past raised some concerns about what it means that an old post re-surfaces on a new URL, signed by an old instance and it does make sense to do some thinking about exactly how to handle that. One option is to have the instance sign it, and drop the old actor id etc. from it, but then it will seem like it's originated from that instance to anyone who pulls it. So it's just a little bit of a hassle to work through the edge cases.
- jameshart 3y ago
  In general, mastodon servers (well behaved ones at least) are kind of vouching for the timestamps of all the messages they host. If a user transfers their account over, with an archive of posts, and uploads them to a server saying 'trust me, bro, I totally posted all this stuff last year'... they're dumping a bunch of posts into that server's feed whose timestamps can't be vouched for. There might be mechanisms for a server to pull in the timestamps from the original host server, or to recognize the posts as having been streamed over previously... but uploading post archives is definitely a 'high trust' action for a server to take on behalf of a user.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Is this an official rationale? People can't migrate data because someone might backdate a post?
    - hnaccount_rng 3y ago
      Which is one of the things Twitter is used as an authority for (e.g. hash dropping). And even having an option to do so removes this utility
  - vidarh 3y ago

by zaphar 3y ago

tedunangst 3y ago

Where can I port my data to using bluesky?

wmf 3y ago
Anywhere, once Bluesky is out of beta.
- smithcoin 3y ago
  Seems pretty obtuse no?
  - josephg 3y ago
    Obtuse? It’s still in private beta. If it’s obtuse, that’s by design. They need time to figure out how the protocol should work before other implementations exist. Once an ecosystem of clients and servers appears, it will become very hard to change core details of the protocol.

vidarh 3y ago

Mastodon very much supports moving followers/following. Not all others do, but the mechanism is well established. It does not yet support moving posts (it supports exporting them, but there's no import mechanism short of an admin manually doing a database import), but there's nothing that makes adding that technically difficult - it's down to coming to agreement about how to do it. That Bluesky in theory supports it is pretty irrelevant until they open up federation.

ekianjo 3y ago
Since its a common ask I wonder why Mastodon has not implemeneted it yet...
- vidarh 3y ago
  They've in the past raised some concerns about what it means that an old post re-surfaces on a new URL, signed by an old instance and it does make sense to do some thinking about exactly how to handle that. One option is to have the instance sign it, and drop the old actor id etc. from it, but then it will seem like it's originated from that instance to anyone who pulls it. So it's just a little bit of a hassle to work through the edge cases.
jameshart 3y ago
In general, mastodon servers (well behaved ones at least) are kind of vouching for the timestamps of all the messages they host. If a user transfers their account over, with an archive of posts, and uploads them to a server saying 'trust me, bro, I totally posted all this stuff last year'... they're dumping a bunch of posts into that server's feed whose timestamps can't be vouched for. There might be mechanisms for a server to pull in the timestamps from the original host server, or to recognize the posts as having been streamed over previously... but uploading post archives is definitely a 'high trust' action for a server to take on behalf of a user.
- wmf 3y ago
  Is this an official rationale? People can't migrate data because someone might backdate a post?
  - hnaccount_rng 3y ago
    Which is one of the things Twitter is used as an authority for (e.g. hash dropping). And even having an option to do so removes this utility
- vidarh 3y ago