> Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive.

Sadly that's still an open issue that from time to time gets new input, but doesn't have a lot of traction. I feel like that's a big blind spot of Mastodon to this day and also basically forces people to stick to the largest instances that are less likely to go away, defeating the purpose of a distributed social network.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

> More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore

I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly?

I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.

As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.

>the server won’t be handed over to anyone else.

That's a shame. It seems to me that we are in a frustrating situation where there are probably clever ways to solve the problems created by social media. But because launching new social platforms requires solving a difficult chicken-and-egg problem, we don't get very many chances to try anything new or innovative.

Another way of putting it is: Occasionally people will speculate about ways to fix issues with Twitter, reddit, etc. Such speculation feels fairly pointless, because there is little evidence that the moderators of those platforms are listening to suggestions, or even care about anything besides profit maximization. Without much demand for improvement ideas, the supply of such ideas tends to dry up as well.

If anyone else is in this situation of desiring to sunset a social platform, I would encourage them to run a contest. People can enter your contest by submitting plans for how to revitalize the platform / a genuinely new direction for social media. You judge the entries, pick a winner, and the winner takes over administration of your platform so they can try out their proposed new direction.

> I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore

I can't figure out if this is me or if things really have changed. I was on early Reddit (before there were comments) and HN. There were always jerks and flamewars and pedants but it just feels like any thread I read on HN or Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal. I've watched long-time members of HN die and I can only think: do I really want to spend most of my life (or a good portion) doing this? It seems so empty.

What do people even get out of this? Is life this boring that people find it entertaining? I just don't get it anymore and I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted. I don't get any enjoyment out of it anymore and I feel like something is wrong with me because others do (only barely, this is insanity that we've adapted to).

2005 me thought things were going to be a lot more interesting, but things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space. (HN is social media - just trolling, the arguments of this are funny). There's gotta be something better. Do people even want better communities, would they recognize them, or is this the new normal? Is the optimism of 2005 dead, impossible to resurrect?

Question: Is there some kind of official protocol for Mastodon?

Reason I ask, is if whoever is in charge have considered to support moving posts and interactions from one server to another.

>Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive

I'm sure there is some technical excuse to why this is the case but just seems entirely broken that it can't just have the owner of the account provably broadcast they control both the original and the destinations and to redirect all posts.

I mean the actual thing that has value IS the posts and there would be less burden on people shutting down these servers if you were not destroying that work by doing so.

> There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.

One of the main issues of running a federated Mastodon instance with little to no money and donations will not cut it.

don't forget to `tootctl self-destruct`

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/tootctl/#self-destruct

EDIT: Once the server disappears, users who did nothing will lose the ability to delete their accounts later.

Without self-destruct, remote servers may retain cached profiles and posts indefinitely, but the original users will no longer control those objects. Mastodon created the command specifically to broadcast account deletions before a permanent shutdown and leave little cached material behind.

I agree. I think part of the problem is how recommendation algorithms have conditioned people to act online. Recommendation algorithms optimize for overall platform engagement to increase revenue, which tends to reward anti-social behavior like flamewars, conflict, ragebait, etc. It's rewarded simply because it creates more engagement than more positive content. Users in turn are conditioned to these algorithms because their anti-social behavior gets rewarded in the form of favorable algorithmic treatment. Now, I feel like the average social media user is just predisposed to act in those negative ways, which is why it's prevalent even on HN where the recommendation algorithms are not tuned in quite the same way.

Those forces weren't present on early social media, and have only gotten worse over time.

I don't think it's you.

Over its course the Internet and Web took over just about all communications, including culturally anchoring things like TV, radio, and newspapers. The takeover accelerated with the rise of broadband, Facebook and smartphones, and is nearly complete. The whole world's here.

This means people who want to advertise, influence, or control large numbers of people also followed.

On my Instagram, sometimes I'll see local news, and the fake accounts are very obvious, they all post practically the same thing and all of their profiles follow similar patterns. Maybe this will go away when everything becomes ID-gated.

The optimism of 2005 was pre-smartphone, pre-social-media, and well before everyone's grandparents were constantly regurgitating political posts on Facebook.

> Do people even want better communities

Most people do not want to put in the work to make them, but they'll certainly join and passively let people run themselves into the ground entertaining them for free. It doesn't make sense to do all the work for lazy people unless you're just wanting to broadcast to the largest audience possible.

One way to think of it is a sort of multiplayer iterated prisoner's dilemma. If players generally cooperate, cooperating is the best strategy. If players generally defect, defecting is the best strategy. Over time you can get a death spiral (loss of social capital) where people defect more, which leads to more defections. You can also get selection effects where people who enjoy conflict stay, and people who dislike conflict leave.

The medium is the message. Certain specific features, such as the retweet-with-comment feature, incentivize starting fights. Older platforms didn't feature likes/retweets as prominently. Newer platforms are constantly giving you numerical scores, which leads to competitive socialization and status-seeking. Some people are into that sort of thing. And to be fair, clout is objectively valuable in certain ways.

> Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal.

Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).

Eventually normal-adjacent people took over the site, which caused a boon of interesting topics and diverse opinions for a long while. The rude-to-be-funny thing never quite stopped, but when it went too far it was moderated or downvoted away.

I'd agree that things have been going downhill for many years now. The peak of genuine and quality engagement is long behind us. LLM-assisted comments are certainly not helping (I'm not talking about bots, I mean people who direct LLMs to write their comments).

People take example from their political and cultural (artists, sportspersons) leaders.

I do think this has always been the case, Jerry Pournelle funnily enough made a very similar observation back in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_(Internet_term)#Histor....)

People who post on the internet are outliers, something like 98% of message board users lurk, can't remember who said it but someone summed it up as "everyone you talk to online is crazy". The reality is life is boring a lot of the time and I've always seen online interaction not as a substitute for social life but with no expectation. Sometimes you get good conversations, often you don't.

There is more negativity in terms of volume which has a quality of its own because it seeps more into real life than in it used to, but honestly some conversations in the olden days were worse.

You’re not alone. Plenty of us feel the same way.

> Is life this boring that people find it entertaining?

I don’t think it has to do with boredom or entertainment. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do push you into addictive behaviour on purpose, but I do think even HN (inadvertently) has addictive properties.

> I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted.

Pretty sure it’s the vibe. Plus, whatever we’re doing here is not really connecting with other people, it’s more akin to shouting at each other across a void. I do still frequent one old-style forum, and there I do see some connection between the regulars.

> things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space.

Once money became a factor, it was only a matter of time. Just the other day I was also thinking how I can’t even stand podcasts anymore, and all the ads are a major factor. Seems like every podcast is part of a network and it’s all about money. No one is just having fun anymore.

> There's gotta be something better.

There is. It’s friends offline.

How about this: Duplicates of the old posts are created on a new host using some import/export mechanic, but they also contain a cryptographic signature proving ownership of the old posts (utilizing some secret only the original poster would have access to).

When a reference to a post becomes invalid because it's underlying host is gone, the other host holding those references tries to find new duplicate posts with the correct signature, and if it finds them, updates the broken old references to point to these new duplicates. If it doesn't find any duplicates with a matching signature, it leaves the references broken and has some cooldown before it tries to fix them again.

Considering the system has a way to federate a server self destructing telling other servers to delete its posts could a similar system not just tell other servers to update their URL for that users posts.

Not pretending to know anything about the system feel free to point out why this wouldn't work. I'm just approaching it from a user perspective that having to lose posts to move server is bad for users and having to choose to nuke all posts in the case of shutting down a server is bad for admins.

Like usual, the Mastodon people have the least understanding of how federation actually works.

When a server stops federating, the federated posts still exist in the DB of all the remote instances that recieved it. They're still indexed and searchable from there. You could move those posts into the DB of a new server, but they'll still "originate" from the old one. But you can carry on and interact with old threads.

There's no real foolproof mechanism for updating posts, although there is an AP Update activity, much like deletes there's nothing forcing an instance to respect it.