Hi, I’m relatively new to mastodon and my instance appears to have shut down without notice. Very frustrating. I didn’t do the sensible thing of backing up my account (albeit didn’t post that often so not so bothered about content, and setting up a blog soonish). I want to move my account so my followers follow the new one, can I make that happen without being able to log into the old account? Or do I have to start from scratch and just chalk this up to experience? I really value being on mastodon and decentralised alternatives to corporation run services despite the learning curve involved. TIA for any help you can give.
That sucks, sorry to hear it. As far as I know, account migration requires the old instance to still be running, because there’s some sort of handshake between the instances to move the data. Do you know your instance admin? Can you find out what happened?
Yes sadly.
I bet in future there will be a way of being able to search other instances to find posts by yourself on peoples’ accounts that followed you, as some of it will be cached, but it would take a long time and a lot of network traffic I expect, and depending on other servers’ media retention policies, you might not get all your attachments either.
What instance is that?
It was an activism one. I contributed to running costs (one off donation though) but seems that they shut down due to lack of funding. It is easy to underestimate how overloaded instances may have gotten due to X collapsing in real time. Think boundaries around numbers are crucial for small instances, so that mods can keep it at least somewhat sustainable. Obvs cost of living crisis etc doesn’t help
By this reason ,I have accounts in several servers,in order to avoid overloading and high costs