Problems migrating away from micro.blog to Mastodon

First of all, thanks for implementing this feature. Early on in the heady days of my return to micro.blog late last year, I migrated my Mastodon followers to micro.blog, and then almost immediately decided that was a bad idea, because Mastodon is Mastodon and micro.blog is micro.blog and it’s best to be judicious about mixing the two. Cross-posting to Mastodon is the best way to reach Masto people–for me at least.

So I jumped on the "Migrate away… " button after seeing the announcement this morning, and entered mitchw@mastodon.social, per the instructions that say that I should enter the account username@domain.

I got an error message that said:

“Could not find matching profile alias on Mastodon.”

That’s the first problem I encountered. I think there’s a missing character in the instructions–it should suggest entering @username@domain rather than username@domain.

When I entered @mitchw@mastodon.social I got a different error message this time:

“Error downloading Mastodon profile.”

I don’t know why micro.blog is downloading my Mastodon profile when I’m migrating to Mastodon, rather than from it.

Please fix?

I’m impressed by the work you’re doing here, keeping the servers running while steadily rolling out new features.

Thanks!

Thanks, we’ll fix the “@” differences. That’s a bug. The first error is actually correct, but we need to add more documentation to explain how it all works.

Micro.blog has to download information from your Mastodon profile to confirm that it’s actually yours. The “matching profile alias” error means that you need to go into your Mastodon instance preferences and add your Micro.blog username there as an alias. Then when you go back to Micro.blog and initiate the transfer, it can check that the same person owns both accounts.

Let me know if you have any other questions! This is very early, so might be couple rough spots still.

I think I successfully navigated the process, but am still seeing a potential big problem:

On the good side: The message I now see on

https://micro.blog/account/mastodon

is:

Your Mastodon-compatible username has moved. Followers will be moved to Mitch Wagner (@mitchw@mastodon.social) - Mastodon.

And my mastodon.social account is showing up as my Mastodon ID here:

https://micro.blog/MitchW

However, my followers don’t seem to have moved–at least not yet. It’s been roughly 16 hours and my follower count at @mitchw@mastodon.social is exactly the same as before. Do I need to just give it more time, or has something gone wrong?

Also, another bug which I’m afraid I did not write down details on: When I got to the end of the migration process, I clicked the “go ahead do it” button and got no feedback. I wasn’t even sure I had clicked it so of course I did what you’re not supposed to do and I clicked it again. Still no feedback.

Thanks for the opportunity to test this.

Sorry, there was a bug with this that I just fixed. However, I think the local Micro.blog-only followers were stuck in a weird state. I’m trying to fix this manually for your account.

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Checking in to see if my micro.blog followers have all been moved to @mitchw@mastodon.social? I’m not seeing evidence that they have and I’m seeing some evidence that they have not moved and they are still following me here on micro.blog.

Of course I can’t tell for sure because I can’t see who is, or was, following me on micro.blog from Mastodon.

Once the migration is complete, I’ll probably switch off aliasing or forwarding or whatever it’s called. At that point, anybody who wants to follow me on micro.blog from Mastodon is welcome to do so.

Thanks!

Any word on this bug? Thanks!

I’m just going to assume the migration worked. I’ve switched off migration, so people who want to follow me directly on micro.blog can do so now.

Unfortunately I’m in the similar position - but because I know how much followers I’ve moved from Mastodon to micro.blog, I’m now pretty sure that they aren’t being moved to Mastodon again. Seems like it stuck after 30 people.

Thanks, I’m looking into how we can make a “migrate again” type of button if the migration was stalled. I also wouldn’t put too much faith in the exact follower count numbers, because it’s common for Mastodon instances to go away and I can imagine the counts will get out of sync. Of course, they should be close to right, though.

True! But I knew that this number should be in hundreds, so I’m 100% sure that 30 is wrong.

Just bumping this with a question - is there anything going on regarding this exact thing? It still doesn’t work as expected

Bumping it once again since it doesn’t work still, unfortunately.

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Bumping :thinking:

Just a quick update, still working on this. I’ll post an update here or news.micro.blog when there is some more progress. Thanks!

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Any news on this topic?

I’ve been reviewing this. @przemek, would you like me to initiate another “move” of your followers to your Mastodon profile?

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Yes, please. :wink::+1:

Hello @manton
Did you see my response?
Can you help me with that?

I’ve done some more testing on this and looked at the latest version of what Mastodon has documented. I’m making a change that will be live tomorrow morning and then I’ll run this again on your account @przemek. Thanks!

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Works like a charm!