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.
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.