Transferring your Mastodon account to another server

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FediTips has a great write up here:

We’ll do an abbreviated version assuming you’re moving over to a new account here on CoSocial.

New account on CoSocial

Log into your CoSocial account at https://cosocial.ca, go to Preferences > Account > Moving From A Different Account (at the bottom of the screen), click on Create an account alias and follow the instructions.

Old Account

log into your OLD account on the old server’s website, go to Preferences > Account > Move To A Different Account (also at the bottom of the screen), click on Configure it here and follow the instructions.

This will start transferring your followers to the new account. The accounts won’t transfer all in one go, they will come across in waves depending on how busy their own servers are. Some of your followers will automatically follow your new account straight away, while others may take hours (or in extreme cases even days!). Don’t worry though, you can carry on with the next steps while this is happening in the background.

Export from Old Server

Go to Preferences > Import And Export > Data Export and download all the CSV files one file at a time by clicking on the CSV icons.

Import to CoSocial

On your CoSocial account, go to Preferences > Import And Export > Import and upload the CSV files one at a time (the files which you just downloaded in the previous step). Remember to select the correct file type from the drop-down menu for each CSV file before you upload it.

Your Followers (those who followed your old account) will move automatically as part of the process above.

Your Follows — those accounts that YOU follow — need to be manually imported with this CSV file. You can bring over all your exports — but this Follows one is most crucial.

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This works well, I’ve done two moves on my way here-- https://mastodon.social/@cogdog first and then I transferred to https://social.fossdle.org/@cogdog before coming here.

Soooooo I went back to my very first one on mastodon.social. There is an option to create a redirect, so now I have another old account pointing here.

Another thing that does not come over are your favorites. I generally use Bookmarks to keep track of posts (old posts get hard to find as time goes by, so I bookmark key ones) and those can be exported/imported.

Lastly I had a few Application tokens set up in Settings → Development (used for some IFTTT workflows) that I had to recreate here and then change in those environments.

I do like that many fediverse apps can authenticate you after you enter the instance domain, it works cleanly.

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Note: As of Mastodon 4.2.3 there is a bug that will cause a large number of “rate limit exceeded” messages to appear when you are importing followers from another server.

A notification is sent for every new follower to your new account, which overloads the notification API.

These messages are harmless and will subside when the import is complete.

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