Status update. I initiated the migration from my previous account to this one almost 23 hours ago – a migration from Mastodon to Akkoma (a fork of Pleroma).
My follower count at time of move was 3,660. So far 986 of those followers have auto-followed the new account (meaning they support and accept the Move request). The old account indicates that 120 followers are still followers of that account. Likely they do not support the Move request.
What this does mean though is that 2,554 followers are right now in limbo. 😅
My thinking is that the automation of re-follows is just queued and taking a while. But it is unclear for how long the re-follow requests will keep trying before they are canceled.
I also experienced plenty of hiccups during many hours after I started the migration, unable to see a lot of updates. The server has likely been extremely busy trying to sort out the move.
Anyway, it’s an interesting experiment and a good use-case for looking at what one can expect when migrating. I’ll follow up with any significant changes or developments.
My own follower list has just been uploaded and will start making requests as well.
I’ve been looking at this challenge with lost followers during migration. While it may at first seem concerning to someone that I “lost” thousands of followers during a migration I don’t think my migration should be used as an example of this.
My theory is that many of my followers were people who tried out Mastodon for a brief while and then abandoned the service because it wasn’t a good fit for them. They read one of my guides and I just happened to be one of the first people they followed because of this.
As they never log in again the re-follow request is never activated. Which makes sense from a resource-perspective. If a server drops a follow that frees up resources. A re-follow only needs to be activated if that person actually requests to see their timeline.
Instead of being about “lost” followers I think the real issue here may be about how many accounts should be visible indefinitely if the account owner never logs in again. Perhaps it shouldn’t matter.
Of course, if someone puts emotional value in the number of followers it may be a demotivating to migrate knowing that this number will very likely go down. We should probably just let people enter their own follower numbers. Whatever makes someone feel good 😁. In the end this can of course already be done depending on tech savviness.
Anyway, there are bigger issues to address here as well with the architecture when it comes to encouraging true decentralisation and independence, but that is for another day.