this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

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People say Mastodon migration is better than Lemmy's, but their documentation says "Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations", am I missing something? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Blaze@sopuli.xyz to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I've seen a few comments in the other thread about community centrization

Your following, blocking, muting, and domain-blocking lists can be imported at Settings > Import, where they can either be merged or overwritten.

Mastodon currently does not support importing posts or media due to technical limitations

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export

Seems pretty similar to the way we manage it with Lemmy at the moment (settings menu, export JSON, import JSON), am I missing something?

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[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I believe there is some tenuous support for this in the underlying ActivityPub protocol but it's not really implemented by anyone afaik. I'm not sure if the protocol makes it easy.

If Lemmy, Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps supported protocol-level moving, you could in theory even move from Lemmy to Mastodon or vice versa, and not just from one app to the same app on a different instance.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If Lemmy, Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps supported protocol-level moving, you could in theory even move from Lemmy to Mastodon or vice versa, and not just from one app to the same app on a different instance.

I feel like we would have colonized Mars before this would happen.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, maybe with Lemmy and Mastodon. If I recall correctly, both Lemmy and Mastodon started as separate projects that then only later tacked on ActivityPub support. I am by no means an expert in ActivityPub, but I believe this approach of only adding it on later may have made things more complicated. It's possible that a newer alternative that was built with federated protocols in mind from the start would have an easier time (this is mostly just speculation from my part).

I suppose there is unfortunately also little motivation for supporting protocol-level moving, as it allows people to move entirely away from your software, which developers don't want as they rely on donations from the users. Although it obviously also allows users to move to your software so... 🤔

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Mars seems closer after reading your comment 😄

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 3 points 3 months ago

Mars is currently getting closer to the Earth in their orbits, so this may be both figuratively and literally true.

But yea it's hard. Federated social media is by definition a harder problem than centralized ones. It's more flexible and malleable, but building such systems is always a mess.

Also (sorry, this is getting anecdotal again), I recently read up on the inner workings of ActivityPub and uuh... I gotta say I am actively disheartened by its complexity. It is an exceedingly flexible protocol, but that flexibility comes at a very high complexity cost. I am not convinvced it is as simple as it could have been, unfortunately.