I made the right choice of setting up a personal web page with rss and using “social media” only to re-share content and exchange comments.

ActivityPub turned out to be a set of feudal (but federated) warring fiefdoms, blocking, spamming and moderating each other. BlueSky is slowly spiraling down while FB and legacies are ever more infested with AI agents and slop.

My previous ActivityPub home started malfunctioning, so I decided to jump ship while I still can and let the server migration process run its course.

Migration

On the new ActivityPub server, I noted that I’m migrating to it, which enabled an alias for the old account. In turn on the old server, I noted I’m migrating to the new one - which switched it to serve “migration notice”. This makes my followers’ ActivityPub servers rewrite my account’s contact thus switching them to follow me on the new server. This migration happens for each of my followers independently, whenever they login and my outbox on the old account is fetched. I’m seeing the count of followers slowly trickling over.

The worst part of migration is that full account export from the old server does not contain the Followed Hashtags nor Filters. One has to manually re-add them one-by one. This is a pretty big pain point in the migration process.

Mastodon.social

I picked Mastodon.social as it is the biggest server (too big to fail), with all the newest features and most users. The federated promise of ActivityPub did not deliver, so I picked the most practical server to reach the most like-minded people. The down side of this server is much more moderation, hence I cannot monitor all political and social trends. Fortunately any Mastodon user on any server can be followed in a RSS reader by appending .rss to their profile URL.

What next?

I’ll continue to re-share my content from personal web page. Folks can follow me on ActivityPub, BSky or via my RSS feed. I’m also likely to increase my usage of an RSS reader to follow people outside of ActivityPub.