That’s not entirely true. I migrated my mastodon account a new instance recently. I lost my posts, but everything else transferred or I was able to migrate manually.
How did new followers find you? Your username is literally username @ mastodoninstance.com. I guess you can import/export some stuff, but that all relies on your instance closing down gracefully and giving people time to migrate which is not a guarantee. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience, it was not fun. Granted, I still use mastodon, but it was annoying.
That’s not entirely true. I migrated my mastodon account a new instance recently. I lost my posts, but everything else transferred or I was able to migrate manually.
How did new followers find you? Your username is literally username @ mastodoninstance.com. I guess you can import/export some stuff, but that all relies on your instance closing down gracefully and giving people time to migrate which is not a guarantee. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience, it was not fun. Granted, I still use mastodon, but it was annoying.
My old account forwards to my new account. Current followers were automatically added to my new account.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
Interesting. Looks clunky but solves at least some scenarios