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?

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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Mastodon has a redirect. I believe that's the only thing missing.
- Thanks. I guess at the moment people manually redirect using pinned posts in communities and in their old profile bio.
  
  On Mastodon it's all about who you're following and who you're being followed by, so being able to move somewhere else and take your followers with you is a big deal.
  On the Threadiverse we don't really follow users so much, so the whole concept of account migration becomes very different. Migration of communities rather than of users would probably be the best parallel - it would be great if subscribers could automatically follow a migrating community without having to manually resubscribe.
  
  I see. On the other hand, I've done it a few times (you announce it beforehand, create the new community, lock the old community with a pinned post) and it's usually okay. Not ideal of course, but still not a breaking point.
  The argument I've seen a few times is that "communities should be able to move all of their posts and comments elsewhere, on Mastodon it's possible", but it doesn't seem to be the case from the OP.
  
  Ah yeah, it's not possible on Mastodon either. Your content stays where it is.
  I think it's even less of a problem on the Threadiverse than it is on Mastodon though. Most people are interested in new content here, we rarely go digging too much through the archives. Though it would of course be neat.
  
  we rarely go digging too much through the archives
  Not for day to day use, but the main value reddit had was because of good information posted there. I hope Lemmy could replace reddit on that matter too. So when you need to search for something online you could use the fediverse as a good source instead of proprietary sites.
  
  It seems to be a different question than migrating the content.
  We moved !casualconversation@lemmy.world to !casualconversation@lemm.ee, but the content of the old community is still accessible for everyone.
  This has more to do with the instance hosting the former community still being available than migration of the content itself
  
  From experience moderating on Reddit, user histories were pretty useful in judging whether they just made a mistake or were ban evading or trolling. If a fresh account drops in with a trollish comment as their first interaction with the community, they might just catch a ban rather than being treated as a good faith poster who came in too hot and deserves a second chance.
  So if you migrate accounts in Lemmy, you'll have to pay that price over again and risk more strict moderation because you have no history, whereas a Mastodon-like link to their previous account would establish a baseline.
  
  Yeah, sure. But then again everyone should aim to behave in a way where it doesn't take goodwill not to ban them - especially here, where you might be banned from some instances but not others, and never even know it.
  In that sense, if you were to migrate your profile, your bans should also migrate with you.
  
  I think there's gray areas where someone comes in hot to play devil's advocate and if they have a history that looks like a normal contrarian person elsewhere they might just get a removal and/or a warning, but if they're a 2 day old account with 5 one word comments, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.
  Granted, you shouldn't expect mods to try to figure out your personal history and state of mind to know you weren't trying to troll in your very first post in their community, but it's at least something to try to sort out those gray area comments. Or something to review if the user appeals their ban.
  And yeah, taking your bans with you in migration would be the cost of maintaining that history. It's a commitment to owning your own posts and history.

17 comments