What happens when I switch my domain from Mastodon to Ghost?

Using Ghost
1

So I was running a small personal Mastodon server, and tbh it was a little slow and kind of expensive ($17/mo) for what I was getting out of it.

I decided to give Ghost’s ActivityPub feature a go ($15/mo, no more updating, and more features!), and I was wondering… what happens when I move my custom domain over from Mastodon to Ghost?

This isn’t theoretical, because I’ve already done it… and what I see is:

  • Gradually followers seem to be re-following on Ghost, this seems to be coming in waves (I think this might depend on their server configurations?)
  • I have to re-follow any accounts I was previously following
  • My old posts are gone

I don’t have an issue with any of this, I was expecting to start over from scratch really… but is there any sort of documentation about what’s expected to happen in this scenario?

Love the feature btw, seems like a clever product choice.

2

Oh, how interesting!

Since you had a personal server, you were then able to re-use the same handle? I think that’s not going to be the case for most users (because our handles are tied to some bigger Mastodon install), but it’s great that you’re seeing followers show up.

This describes how to move between Mastodon servers - you can export the people you’re following.

However, I don’t think there’s currently an import functionality in ActivityPub. If it’s a few dozen follows, I’d probably just cut and paste them one at a time into the search in Ghost’s AP implementation. If it’s thousands, you might watch (f12 → network) the process of adding a follower (or read the code, but I find watching network calls faster) and see if you can automate it.

1 Like
3

Yep! if I recall correctly the default handle was something like @index and when I changed it to match my old server (profile > edit profile) the followers started coming back. A nice surprise more than anything.

Ah right that makes sense, I guess a bulk action like that is more in any individual app’s control and the ActivityPub protocol is meant to handle the basic action of following itself.

In my case it wasn’t many, so it’s easy enough to do manually.

1 Like
4

im currently running an entire mastodon instance as a subdomain. im curious how this will work once i get the activitypub working for self hosting with the docker container image from docker hub and the activitypub from their git repo. with their “docker installation” method now being talked about it seems there is a lot of confusion between the docker hub image and the docker/caddy install from the install docs

5

I have a Mastodon Account (@uebergabe@mastodon.social) and I use @pflege@uebergabe.de from my Ghost ActivityPub.

I’d like to login via any iphone app (Mastodon or Ivory) to take part in the Fediverse. But my app uses @uebergabe@mastodon.social but I want to be logged in as my Ghost handle. So is it possible, to transfer the account to the Ghost one to take part in discussions and so on (and using hashtags, …)? Becasue so I have to instances and my followers are wondering who they should follow now and I don’t really know, from which account I should be active in discussions. When I think of the future ithe Ghost handle should now build up, but there are some limits to use it properly.