When a #Mastodon instance retires, what should happen to your posts?

Oliphantom Menace

Oliphantom Menace

Mostly just curious how many people want a 'memorial' for old posts.

Also curious how many admins would willingly host all the old posts for their former users on an HTML site, even if they don't want to run Mastodon anymore.

Andres Jalinton

@oliphant I'm still looking for a way to import the tweets I exported years ago into my instance. I would like to be able to mass import because could be very useful in case of database corruption.

Oliphantom Menace

@Andres There's at least a way to convert them into a static HTML site.

Twitter archiver

A simple, searchable, themeable archive of your public tweets

(tinysubversions.com)

There's also this: https://github.com/timhutton/twitter-archive-parser

And that's actually the goal of Posty, something I created, but for Mastodon archives. Turning your archive of posts into a static HTML site.

Andres Jalinton

@oliphant Yeah, I already have those hosted as HTML (probably used your tool, thanks!) but it's not the same.

Oliphantom Menace

@Andres Yeah, importing the posts as ActivityPub posts is a really hard problem to solve.

Mentions, for instance. Custom emojis that might be lacking on your instance. The past-dating itself might be an issue. Also: Do you notify people and send a stream of requests out as if these are new messages, or do you suppress them?

Also, these archives contain your DMs and Followers Only messages, too. Do you import those as well? Hopefully you get the audience right, or that's a bunch of DMs hitting the Public feed. (Posty ignores these.)

Oliphantom Menace

@Andres Also, I just wrote that tool.... last weekend, and I keep tweaking it. So good on you for using it already

Andres Jalinton

@oliphant
I would only add those to the database, it wouldn't show up unless searching or being actually replied/boosted by myself.

Oliphantom Menace

@Andres There's also the upload of potentially hundreds of MB of images as well, it's not just the text of the posts, it's also the image and video assets, which could increase the costs for the new host.

I do think it should be an option, like I wish that Mastodon when it created an export also considered the import side, too.

Captain Superfluous

@oliphant

I have auto delete on so I am not attached to my old posts at all.

Oliphantom Menace

@CptSuperlative I auto delete, but 5 faves, 5 boosts, a DM or a bookmark from me will save it. That seemed like a good baseline criteria, anything that doesn't meet that bar can go after a month.

Kaleb 📝

@oliphant While I would like to have true profile portability rather than a static site, I see a major moderation problem with importing and backfilling – let alone the technical challenges.

Oliphantom Menace

@kaleb I'm basically trying to focus on fully implementing option #2, up to and including, if they do it right, having all your old status URLs from the previous site continue to work.

Consider this intro post of yours, for example

https://posty.1sland.social/@[email protected]/111259435065184684

If the server hosting it was social.coop instead of posty.1sland.social and the folder name of your archive was kaleb instead of [email protected], then assuming social.coop was going "out of business", setting up a Posty archive and letting you upload it at archive.social.coop means you get to restore all your old status links in advance, then, when social.coop retires, they just close down the social.coop Mastodon server and instead point social.coop at archive.social.coop.

And suddenly https://social.coop/@kaleb/111259435065184684 points at the exact-same post--even though the Mastodon site itself is totally gone, deleted, retired.

This is the 'switcheroo' I'm hoping to pull.

Oliphantom Menace

Wouldn’t be the first time I built the thing that nobody seems to want.

Mr Bitterness

@oliphant I wouldn't assume that. This is a pain point for people when instances shut down, etc. But, someone has to be in that position to start thinking or investigating why they might need this. It's also the holidays and people are busy with other things.

Give it a chance. I'm watching it myself, and was inspired by what you were doing enough to try to build my own web client (it will be shitty, I just wanted to see if I could do it. So far it works more or less for what I've built.)

Oliphantom Menace

@mrbitterness Oh, haha, I mostly just meant the poll results. The #2 option is basically what I'm working on but it's the least popular choice so far. Not a big deal, though. I do think there's enough of a need for it.

Robert George 𓇳𓃀𓁹𓏏𓇥𓆓𓀀

@oliphant I chose the first option, because I’d take the archive and put it somewhere to be forgotten. But really, I don’t case about my old posts, they can disappear into the ether as the internet has done time and time again.

Oliphantom Menace

@rrgeorge After looking at my archive I was kinda like, “does anyone ever need to see this again?”

Oliphantom Menace

@rrgeorge Also: “Oh wait, no, now this is too easy to find.”