Requesting clarity on transferring followers

Understanding Micro.blog
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This discussion and follow-up questions are about transferring followers back and forth between a Micro.blog account and Mastodon, and what happens when we do.

Just to clear this up first, I understand that each blog has its owner ActivityPub endpoint that can be subscribed to by itself, which is not the same as cross-posting. I also know we can change the address of our blog and Mastodon-compatible username. My question isn’t really related to any of this, directly.

Where things get really confusing for me (because this isn’t well-documented) is how transferring of followers works.

I’ve waffled back and forth between wanting all of my followers on Mastodon or Micro.blog, so I’ve transferred followers back and forth a couple of times. However, commenting behavior on my posts from others has made this area really muddy for me.

For example, recently I transferred my Micro.blog followers to Mastodon. However, if I post an update to Micro.blog and have it cross-posted to Mastodon, I will get people commenting inside of Micro.blog as well as on Mastodon, from Mirco.blog users in both cases.

Meaning my cross-post will have person@micro.blog responding, and then I’ll have other Micro.blog users responding from the Micro.blog timeline, too. I’m trying to understand why this happens so I can better manage the whole thing.

My questions:

  1. Are only the people who have set up ActivityPub on Micro.blog the ones who are transferred to Mastodon? Or do all blogs have ActivityPub now?
  2. Are my posts now showing up twice in the Micro.blog Timeline to people who are subscribed to me, one from my Micro.blog blog post and again from my Mastodon account showing up in the Timeline?
  3. What happens to new followers over at Micro.blog after the transfer of users to Mastodon has already occured? Is the transfer a point-in-time thing or persistently updated, like a redirect on Mastodon?
  4. If someone unfollows me after I’ve transferred them to Mastodon, do they also unfollow my Micro.blog account.
  5. Should I disable posting to the Micro.blog timeline if I have transferred my followers to my Mastodon account?

The part that is really weird to me is that I recently had a bunch of responses to a post on Micro.blog. It was also cross-posted to Mastodon, where my followers should be subscribed, but all the discussion was on Micro.blog. Sure, they could have seen someone’s response in the public timeline and responded to that. But how did anyone see my post to begin with on Micro.blog if it wasn’t in discover?

Sorry for all the questions, but I think this is still a very gray area in the documentation. Thanks in advance for any clarity you’re able to provide.

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Transferring users is still a pretty new feature and it can be confusing. I’ll try my best to answer your questions here:

  1. Yes, only accounts on Micro.blog who have ActivityPub enabled will follow on Mastodon when transferred. We enabled ActivityPub it for everyone earlier this year, but someone could still opt out by disabling it again. Those Micro.blog-only accounts would keep following your old Micro.blog account.
  2. No, when a follower is transferred, they should only see your Mastodon posts, unless they go out of their way to re-follow your Micro.blog account. Then they’d be following both, but that seems rare.
  3. New followers in Micro.blog after the transfer will only follow your Micro.blog account. Transferring is a point-in-time thing. It’s possible that we need to improve this to not allow following migrated accounts, or somehow warn the user.
  4. No, because as part of the transfer they should have already unfollowed your Micro.blog account. Account migration is essentially “follow new user / unfollow old user”.
  5. I don’t have good advice here because it depends what you want to do. I think possible improvements to #3 above would make this more obvious for new followers.

Hope this helps. I think we have more work to do to make this seamless, or at least easier.

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@manton Very helpful, thank you!

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Thanks for asking. All this technology geek stuff is as transparent as cement.

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