When I migrated to Pixelfed, I imported a backup that was exported from Instagram. It correctly read all the data and the imported posts had the correct original date and captions and everything. Looking at my profile now on pixelfed.social, the import is disabled by admin. So maybe there's an instance that has the import enabled.
this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
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There's already a feature request for that: https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/2871
So far, I only know of GotoSocial that allows backdating new posts. And it even has a "gallery" theme that you can set as default to get something remotely similar to Pixelfed.
Manually backdating is one thing, but importing them from Instagram with the original timestamp is a different. That's why #2871 is still open and #4558 was closed as "not planned", I guess.
Post dating publications: don't know if the others fediverse instances will understand what you are doing (?).
Pretty sure no admin in the world would like to mess with their database and instance integrity plus potential side effects on the federation.
You may try it in your own lab at first. Something like in a local VM on your own computer, selfhost pixelfed, ask chatgpt how to overwrite publications date and see what happen.
It's not postdating. OP is talking about preserving dates from another platform, even if it means manually editing.
And that would set dates in the past, to match the dates from original publications on instagram, wouldn't it ?
Ah I see what happened here. We are talking about the same thing, but "postdate" means just the opposite. It's setting a date in the future, not past. That would be "backdate."
Oh, my bad. I used postdate but I want to say backdate… 🫢
@Kkk2237pl What ablut Just reposting them with note pointing to their original post date and location.