Some time ago I started my own Mastodon server and opened it up for invites. What I learned quickly is that I wasn’t alone and plenty of others were doing the exact same thing. There was no shortage of options for anyone wishing to join the Fediverse, including lots of bigger servers with far more funding than mine. I then learned more about the problems Mastodon faces on a server - there are a LOT of moving parts and the gentleman driving the Mastodon standard was (and still is) having some trouble with direction now its popularity has exploded. For my little server it had only a handful of users and the VPS it was installed on was struggling, with constant delays and timeouts and an overall lack of reliability I started looking for other options. My original instance used the address @[email protected] which was associated with Mastodon and part of the spoken outro-ductions of all of my podcast episodes as the way to get in touch with me.
I investigated and fell in love with Pleroma and wrote about how you can Own Your Social Graph late last year, mentioning Pleroma as my now preferred Fediverse server and at the time it easily outperformed Mastodon on a VPS with only 256MB of RAM (Mastodon was slow even with 1.6GB of RAM). I tried it briefly to confirm it’s functionality on a sub-domain: @[email protected] and after a few weeks tried a backend switch (move Pleroma underneath the original Mastodon address and domain) only to discover that followers wouldn’t and couldn’t be migrated between the servers. Messaging was a complete mess and I was unable to follow or be followed by anyone that had followed me previously. I hence ended up sticking with my “new” pleroma sub-domain in the longer term than I’d planned, and asked people to follow me there instead.
Since I wrote the social graph article there have been a few incidents with Pleroma as they progress towards a formal release. The first was a series of backend changes that meant it would no longer operate as reliably on low-spec VPSs like mine. The second was when the Pleroma team changed the ID data type for posts, which broke a lot of apps and scripts that I had come to rely on for various things (Auto-Posting, iOS apps, MacOS apps). Given how unreliable it had become at that point I decided it was time to shift to a newer, bigger VPS, and to try shifting back to my original domain again.
Now I have a freshly installed Pleroma instance, on my original Mastodon domain: @[email protected] and my pleroma-sub-domain will be deactivated by the end of this month. In order for people to do what I’ve done, effectively switch the backend but keep their domain remains impossible to perform without losing followers. Interestingly, it’s the only way I know of to pull that off. The sequence:
- Start on Domain X
- Create a different Domain Y, then ask followers to follow you there instead
- Re-create your original Domain X, then ask followers to follow you there again
There’s currently no option to import, or auto-re-follow if you swap out the server side components that I’m aware of. I have exports of my original timeline posts for both the Mastodon and first Pleroma accounts, but to date I have not been able to successfully import them. On the plus side the broken apps and scripts have now been mostly fixed with everything I need to use back up and running, fast and reliably again.
So in the end, apologies to all, but I’m done shifting servers and instances around. I think that for the broader fediverse these sorts of issues moving servers will inevitably lead to the same problems as EMail addresses. There is no one true EMail address for most people and knowing someones address on the Fediverse will never be as simple as a single siloed solution because it can not be. Coming from a siloed world it’s annoying but a small price to pay for more control over your own social graph.
If you’re looking for me I’m back at @[email protected] and you can follow me there on the Fediverse.