Episode: 4320
Title: HPR4320: Switching my Mastodon account
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4320/hpr4320.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 22:55:55

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,320 for Friday the 21st of February 2025.
Today's show is entitled, Switching My Mastodon Account.
It is part of the series' social media.
It is hosted by Ahukah, and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, this episode explains how to migrate your Mastodon Account.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
And I'm going back to our discussion about the Fediverse and Better Social Media, and
I'm going to explain how you migrate a Mastodon Account from one instance to another.
And there's times you have to do that.
Now, you want to recall that the whole idea of federated media is that there is no central
server that has all of the accounts.
Instead, what you have is a federation of independent servers, and things happen.
Sometimes the server that you're on might be one person, put it up, and runs it, and
gets tired of it, or has life situations that come up.
And for whatever reason, it starts to go away.
You know, the server that I was on, I was there because I got an invite from my late
lamented friend Craig Maloney to join on the server he was on.
And then I got a notice that the instance I'm on is closing.
Now, it won't be completely shut down for eight months.
So I can't complain about any lack of notice, but I might as well get going on it.
So I thought, cool, I'll do this, and then I can do a little episode for hacker public
radio on how I did it.
Now the first thing to do is check to see if there's good instructions anywhere, directions
for migrating my account.
Now it turns out that it's not all that hard because the Fediverse was built on the understanding
that your account is a separate entity from the instance it is on.
And no one has any incentive to capture users since there's no way to make money from
them.
Quite the contrary, I expect.
It costs money to run a server, which is why I signed up to make a donation to the
person running my old instance.
As male friend, door to door geek always says, support the people who support you.
And that's a pretty good policy.
So in this case, what I did is I went to look up the invaluable site, Feddy.tips, and
link in the show notes for that, which is a general place for information about the Fediverse.
And indeed found a good explanation.
There's a page called transferring your mastodon account to another server, and I'll put that
link in the show notes as well.
So step one, you got to find a new server.
So I went to a related site called Feddy.garden, put that link in the show notes as well.
And there's a lot of different servers, and they give you different ways of looking.
You could do it by language, by shared interest.
If you go there, you can see all the different ways they categorize it.
So I went looking and I found a server that seemed a bit like a good Fed, and it was called
freeradical.zone, put a link to that in the show notes as well.
So I applied for an account there, which was fairly easy, but they have to approve the
application.
Now again, this is a little bit different.
Facebook does not check you over to see if you're the sort of person they want to have.
They're going to over up everything they can get.
But they have basically every server, and we've talked about this before, every server
has their own niche, and they have their own rules and expectations, and you have to
review the policies.
And then they ask you to write a few words about yourself just so they know what kind
of person you are.
So I did that and was told, you know, we'll send you an email if your application is approved.
So while waiting to hear if my application has been approved, I took a look at the next
steps, which involve exporting data from the old server.
This process is not too bad, but I would suggest it really should be done on a desktop
computer using a web browser and not through an app on a phone.
I mean, you could do it, but it's probably going to be more annoying.
Now here's all the things you can move.
You can move a list of your follows, your bookmarks, your lists, your mutes, your blocks,
and your domain blocks.
Now the difference between those last two blocks would be individuals that you've blocked
versus entire domains you've blocked.
And again, you know, the Fediverse, there are some that you probably don't want to, you
may not want to deal with, you know, because everyone who comes from there, you know, maybe
there are a bunch of Nazis or something and it's like, yeah, I don't want to deal with
this crap.
So those are the ones that you can easily move.
So I got the email that my account was approved the day after I made the application.
So time to start doing the work.
Now, what does not get moved this way are a couple of things.
First, if you were following hashtags, all right.
Now if you have done that, you can see which ones you followed by going to the three.menu
next to your name and looking for followed hashtags.
Now you'll need to write these down and manually redo them on your new server.
Now the other thing that you cannot do in this process is move your followers.
Now there is a way to do that.
I'll get to that later.
So for everything else, follows, bookmarks, lists, mutes, blocks, domain blocks.
All you have to do is go to that three.menu to preferences, then import an export and
select export and you can download a CSV file for all six of those things.
Now you download the CSV file, save them to your hard drive.
You can also request an archive of your posts, but that is purely for your own reference
since your old posts cannot be uploaded to your new server.
Now in my case, I passed on that because my old posts are not that important.
I don't consider social media a vital record of my life.
And you know, there may be some of those categories are blank, okay, and if you might find yourself
downloading a zero byte CSV file, that's okay.
I never created any lists, for instance, so you know, I clicked on download CSV for all
of those, but a couple of them were zero byte CSV files and I just deleted those and don't
worry about it.
Now on your new server, you know, once you've been approved and you're ready to go, and
you know, that may depend on the server, the server I picked had that particular procedure
but every server can be different, you know, maybe they automatically add you as soon
as you ask.
But in any case, I go to the new server account, go to the three dot menu, preferences, import
an export, and then since I'm now in the new server, I select import.
Now I'll choose the file that I want to import the CSV file and then there's a drop down
box and you want to basically select the category, this is what I'm uploading.
I mean, you don't want to upload a list of your blocks into your follows area that would
totally hose everything.
So you would select what which it is to go with the file and then just click upload.
You're populating a brand new account, so you know, it doesn't matter what option you
pick, but you do have options either overwrite or merge.
In any case, just pick one of them and do it and that takes care of all of those six
items.
Now back to followers.
There is a way to mostly move your followers.
It is not 100% guaranteed for a variety of reasons, but it's a pretty simple process.
The start is to go to your new account to the three dot menu, preferences, account, and
scroll down to where you see moving from a different account.
I'll follow the directions here to create an alias.
Now this alias is just your old address.
My old address was at a hookah at octadon.social.
So this is the first step.
It doesn't do anything yet, and it's completely reversible if for some reason you want to
stop.
The instructions at FETI tips say you should wait at least five minutes for the next step,
because there's, you know, you're putting something on the server.
It has to propagate and, you know, who knows how fast your server is in handling these
things.
So you know, if you're going to wait a few minutes, I thought this is a good time to do
a little housekeeping.
I use this time to copy my profile from the old account to the new one.
Then on the old account, I added has moved to my name on the old site.
And in my profile text, I put my new address, which is at a hookah at freeradical.zone.
Now is it necessary to do these FETI tips says it isn't really necessary in most cases,
but it can help.
Once I did that, I went to the old site, and this is where the move actually starts.
You go to preferences, account, move to a new account, and you enter your new address.
And in this starts the process of moving your followers.
Now, if you've followed what we said previously, you know that the old server knows who you
follow and who follows you.
And it has to, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to log in with different devices and
different places and be able to see all that information.
So the old server knows this and can send a message from your account to the servers
of the people who follow you and update your address.
Now at this point, we have to say this is not instantaneous.
Now you're at the mercy of those servers of the people that follow you.
So don't be shocked if it takes a few hours or even days for this to all happen.
So as a general rule, they suggest keep your old account for a while.
Just so you can see if anyone is still in your old address, now you can't use your old
account once you've started the migration.
But you can send someone a message from the new account and tell them to manually make
the change in case the automatic move fails.
But that's all there is to migrate in your mastodon account.
I think it took me longer to describe than it will take you to do it.
Quite honestly.
Meanwhile, if you're interested, you can follow me on my new account, which is at ahuka
at freeradical.zone.
So this is ahuka for Packer Public Radio, signing off and is always encouraging you to
support free software.
Bye bye.
And attribution 4.0 International License.
