this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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Pixelfed already does support the image import from Instagram.
Mastodon doesn't seem to support any import from Twitter/X.
I'm assuming account migration from the main social media platforms to be an important feature.
But I don't think supporting ALL social media is realistic unless they all follow the same norms. Which I really doubt.
ActivityPub supports alsoKnownAs and movedTo so that users can migrate their social graphs to a different server or software. Of course that doesn't work for migrating from networks that don't support ActivityPub.
Content import is a separate issue, but I can imagine it being helpful as well.
The annoying thing with ActivityPub is that your username/handle is tightly coupled to a particular server, and moving server requires you to change your handle. Everywhere you've mentioned/documented your old handle is now out of date.
Bluesky handles this a lot better. If you own a domain, you can use it with any Bluesky server by creating a TXT record for validation. Your username is the domain name - if you own
example.com
, you can be@example.com
on Bluesky, without having to self-host it. If you move server, you don't have to change your username. Currently there's just one main Bluesky server but they plan to introduce federation at some point, and their protocol is already mostly designed for it.And the losing server has to cooperate, which is why I mentioned the commitment to support migrating away.
ATProto/Bluesky has some interesting ideas, and I'm interested to see how that develops as third parties start supporting the protocol. For a new service launching now, I think ActivityPub is the more important protocol to support, but it's presumably possible to support both.