There is a lot of back history involved. Some admins don't like the terms of service used at Qoto -- **specifically some quite Libertarian statements** on it which I personally have made motions to change.
In some other cases it's because this instance did not block some other instance which they found deplorable and a nest of iniquity, etc.
I have been out in Diplomatic missions in the past, but not much resulted -- other than me sending detailed correspondence and sometimes being :
* told to not contact them again.
* or losing my local account at that instance for the attempt.
* or simply getting a polite rebuff on the attempt, which appears the most positive result.
#QOTO is **perceived negatively in some quarters** - and that has implications on **who sees your posts here as well**.
See these two blog posts for detailed info on some of my past attempts :
https://write.tedomum.net/rgx/when-you-discover-your-instance-is-blocked
https://write.tedomum.net/rgx/todon-nl-admin-reacts-to-polite-inquiries
>todon dot nl
Wait a minute! Why are you communicating with that user on gameliberty? It’s clearly a rightwinger or even alt-right.
>2 days later
Your account has been suspended and all of your toots and your uploaded media files have been irreversibly removed from this server and servers where you had followers.
They… that… they didn’t just delete his account. They impersonated him, spamming other instances with fake Delete messages, to trick them into helping retroactively censor him, regardless of their ToSes. Because he may have spoken with someone who was likely to be a wingnut.
…
THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD BE USING PUBLIC KEYS JESUS CHRIST
> They… that… they didn’t just delete his account. They impersonated him, spamming other instances with fake Delete messages, to trick them into helping retroactively censor him, regardless of their ToSes. Because he may have spoken with someone who was likely to be a wingnut.
Very true -- that is one angle I hadn't thought about. In fact, the account deletion at the one instance, a huge Abuse of Power considering the circumstances (honestly and clearly documented in the blog post, linked above in a previous comment), that also meant a deletion of the user account content EVERYWHERE.
I have read and thought about the way Hubzilla does things, and it seems a lot better. There, we can pack up at move, with ALL our content preserved, intact.
Which is impossible in Mastodon. The only tool offered is a backup archive creation. This archive, with all toots, images etc, currently cannot be imported in any other instance; and there's no software to view it, to retrieve a toot's text or the attached media, etc.
Not only the @admin did this, surprising since their is supposed to be a Left wing instance, (which I am aligned with).
I had the displeasure to see a good friend lose completely his account and all data from mastodon.social - and no appeal was possible or got any results.
No abuse from this user either. We need smaller instances and closer control of our data, plus portability.
🇳🇱
@design_RG
Importing toots is something ive wanted to add to qoyos feature list. This may be a good reason to focus on that.
I should also point out promising not to behave in this was is also what free speech instances are all about.
If someone could take a shot at creating a JSON viewer, with the proper intelligence to handle the mastodon exported archive, it would already be a HUGE improvement.
Currently, **there's no tool that I know of** -- and [I have posted **a detailed Blog on this**](https://write.tedomum.net/rgx/mastodon-options-for-moving-an-account), and asked friends in various instances.
Got a few pointers but the only viewer I could use was not intended for this and a bit cumbersome.
We are potentially looking at large amounts of personal data; **7000 plus toots, thousands of images in my 450 MB archive**, from this account here at Qoto.
Importing the data into a new instance has big difficulties as it will be propagating to other instances, etc. So this is a difficult and critical job.
**But an archive handler which can navigate the saved data would advance things a lot** and not pose this type of problem. We would be very grateful to anyone who took that project on.
@design_RG
Pretty printing JSON is easy if that's all you want. I guess it depends how far you take it though. If you want a pretty html interface and rendering of markdown in the toot contents and other bells and whistles it becomes a bit more involved, but doable.
Honestly in some ways it might be just as easy to build an importer than it would a viewer, again depending on the feature set of the viewer.
I've had several users in recent days particularly say they would want to mOVe to qoto if they could take their toots with them.
The issue I see with an importer is just one really, that is, a person could abuse it to create post-dated fake toots. The importer would effectively add the ability to create toots with any date timestamp you want.
The other issue is preserving the threads on the toots, this seems like it could be impossible.. Other users replied to your post at another account. You cant change their post to point to your copied toot at the new account. So while importing all your toplevel toots is doable you couldn't really do anything to effectively import the thread of replies attached to it. Even if you only imported your own replies to your own threads they would mostly be hanging replies since the parent comments would be missing.
Is bugzilla even ActivityPub? I would imagine the only way importable toots would be possible at all is if it didn't use the activity pub standard at all. In which case I'd wonder how they safely handle these concerns.
@cy @Gargron @olamundo