Written Version: https://fedihost.co/blog/slug/migrating-to-gotosocial-from-mastodon
GoToSocial
If you've ever used something like Twitter or Tumblr (or even Myspace!) GoToSocial will probably feel familiar to you.
You can follow people and have followers, you make posts which people can favourite and reply to and share, and you scroll through posts from people you follow using a timeline.
You can write long posts or short posts, or just post images, it's up to you.
You can also, of course, block people or otherwise limit interactions that you don't want by posting just to your friends.
Mastodon & GoToSocial
Mastodon is great! If you want a full-featured ActivityPub microblogging server with all the bells and whistles, go use that instead :)
GoToSocial's niche is small or single-user instances running on low-powered devices, like single-board computers or old laptops repurposed as home servers.
Our focus is on providing lightweight software which is simple to install and maintain, and has good security and sensible defaults out of the box.
The system requirements are right here
Other GoToSocial features are here.
Migration Mastodon to GoToSocial
One of the coolest things about GoToSocial is support for the Mastodon move command.
Allowing you to migrate a Mastodon account to and from GoToSocial. We're going to go through how to do a migration today with version 18.3 of GoToSocial.
Create A GoToSocial Instance: https://fedihost.co/pricing
Limitations
There are a few limitations to migration and things you should know about a migration first.
Things You Can Migrate
- Followers - Automatically
- Bookmarks - CSV Download/Upload
- Follows - CSV Download/Upload
- Lists - CSV Download/Upload
- Mutes - CSV Download/Upload
- Blocks - CSV Download/Upload
- Domain Blocks - CSV Download/Upload
- Hashtags - Manual Data Entry
Things You Canβt Easily Move
At this point your posts and media cannot easily be migrated. If you are on someone else's mastodon server or one of the large public instances like mastodon.social you cannot migrate your posts.
If this is important to you there is a tool and you are comfortable with command line tools there is a tool called slurp which effectively recreates your posts and media on your new instance.
Portability If you like GoToSocial it is better to move onto an instance and domain that you have some control over sooner rather than later. One advantage of this is a fully portable account