So it seems it suffers from the same issue that Dispora has (or had for all the time I followed): No decent user migration?
That is, it seems I pick an instance (or host my own, but still: I pick a host) and can never move without losing all stuff? If I join one of the big instances to play around and later want to self-host I'm .. out of luck? That's quite sad. Still far better than Twitter I assume and I will give it a try. But I would've felt better knowing that I can take my ball and play elsewhere when I feel like it.
An account migration feature is getting closer. An update earlier this month added the possibility to download a dump of all your toots, boosts, and likes.
OT: It doesn't bother me personally, but I'll never understand why they added an unnecessary barrier to entry like that. Not many serious people are going to join a platform that risks them getting quoted in the press as "X tooted that ...". I guess it was supposed to be a funny parody of twitter?
Woah. Huh. I totally managed to never notice that.
FWIW, the place I was going was "the only place where toot normally comes up as a word is when people talk about the sound of a fart or in the phrase 'to toot your own horn', which is way too close to home".
(And "tweet" still does not feel like "a word" in the way that "toot" does. I would want to see a survey done, as a random dictionary is not how you define if a word exists, to the extent to which a word can exist at all.)
That is, it seems I pick an instance (or host my own, but still: I pick a host) and can never move without losing all stuff? If I join one of the big instances to play around and later want to self-host I'm .. out of luck? That's quite sad. Still far better than Twitter I assume and I will give it a try. But I would've felt better knowing that I can take my ball and play elsewhere when I feel like it.
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177
https://discourse.joinmastodon.org/t/migratory-accounts/268