Migrating 50+ accounts across the fediverse

It’s been three weeks since Colin, the administrator of the botsin.space Mastodon server dedicated to creative social media bots, announced he will be shutting it down.

I honestly did not expect that to ever happen. Botsin.space has just always sort of been there, for anyone interested in learning about creative bots. Well, for the past seven years, but that’s forever in internet years.

And to add to the heartbreak, there was still the task of migrating 50+ accounts from this server. Yeah. Fun.

I’ve looked at GoToSocial first, which, if you’re not familiar, is another fediverse platform, out of many others, and has some neat features and advantages over the more popular Mastodon, mainly that it’s a lot more light-weight, and in turn should be cheaper to host. Which, frankly, is a big selling point if you’re about to run a social media server for a few dozen accounts that each posts every few hours and have over 6,000 unique followers combined.

I set up a GoToSocial server, created an account, and started experimenting.

Unfortunately, I quickly run into an issue with the Mastodon library I’ve been using. This is not the fault of GoToSocial, rather the library is a bit outdated, and while GoToSocial’s API is compatible with Mastodon’s, the library itself simply did not work.

And honestly, with all the other projects I’ve been working on, countless unmaterialized ideas, and everything else that’s going on right now, I just don’t have the mental energy to spend the time to sort that out. The next best thing: moving the bots to a Mastodon server and keep all the code as it is right now.

I’ve considered setting up a new Mastodon server, or signing up for the Bots In Box, a paid server that coincidentally runs on GoToSocial.

And while the pricing is pretty fair, their £20/month “unlimited” plan is more than I’m willing to invest into something that makes no money given that I already pay for hosting of most of my other online work.

So I decided to move all my bots to my own server.

I only finished the migration yesterday, but everything seems to be running pretty well, and I’m really happy about that. I did consider having to ask my bots’ followers to chip in if it turned out I need to upgrade the server, but that doesn’t seem to be necessary, at least not quite yet.

Well, here’s to Colin, and to the community he’s created and supported for years. Hopefully others will also be able to find a new home for their bots, and we’ll see even more of them, making our social media feeds more fun to browse.