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I don't really understand the problem here. If the server storing all of your posts is going down. You need to download all of your posts, and then upload them to your new account on a new server. Its the same across both. How would it magically transfer to another server without your intervention?

you can't move data from one server to the other as you could with a PDS. You download an archive and then make a _new_ post at best.

Actually you can use the SLURP tool to move your archive. Many friends have done so, moving Mastodon and even Pixelfed accounts over to GoToSocial while preserving their entire archives: codeberg.org/vyr/slurp But yeah, I'm the first to admin ATproto is far superior at this

Slurp is a super cool archiving tool, but it doesn't really (fully) solve the problem. It simply posts _new copies_ of your old posts on your new server. Because ActivityPub uses URLs as post IDs, it is not possible to actually move the old posts across. So links, boosts, likes, etc do not transfer.

Correction: "ActivityPub uses URLs as post IDs" –  it would be more precise to say that current implementations do so. I believe this is not totally an inherent limitation of the protocol, as it actually only requires URIs, so DIDs could in theory be used like in ATProto. I may be wrong here though…

The need to pick a server is why I never got anywhere with Mastodon. I wanted crafters, writers, activists and engineers/scientists and didn't want what I picked to make it harder to access information from any of these groups or label me in specific ways.

How did you find out it was shutting down?

Haven’t used this account at all, so I don’t care. Tried to log in, googled “mastodon”, got a login page, didn’t work. It said: > If your account is hosted on a different server, you will not be able to log in here. Great, now I need to know the exact thing I signed up on 4 years ago ...

Found the actual login page thanks to password manager. Followers 0 Following 0 Posts 0 So nothing lost, but a good example of how choosing a server upon signup is terrible and a potentially irreversible decision.