1   04 September, 2020
 2
 3Migrating from Mastodon to Pleroma
 4
 5Mastodon bad. Pleroma good.
 6
 7   If you've been following me on the fediverse, you would've witnessed my
 8   numerous (failed) attempts at migrating from Mastodon to Pleroma,
 9   running on my Raspberry Pi. I finally got it working, and these are the
10   steps I took. It's sort of a loose guide you could follow, but I can't
11   promise it'll work for you.
12
13   The Erlang and Elixir packages are pretty broken and outdated on
14   Raspbian. So this time, I built them from source.^[1]1^[2]2 I also
15   assume you have Mastodon and Pleroma (source, not OTP) installed --
16   probably at /home/mastodon/live and /opt/pleroma, respectively.
17
18   Once you have Erlang and Elixir compiled and sitting in your PATH, pull
19   [3]soapbox-pub/migrator. Now read the readme and the do_migration.sh
20   script to get an idea of what you're getting into.
21
22   Move into the cloned directory and create a .env:
23MASTODON_PATH=/home/mastodon/live
24PLEROMA_PATH=/opt/pleroma
25
26   Then, run:
27$ yarn   # install deps
28$ cp -r mastodon/* /home/mastodon/live
29$ cp -r pleroma/* /opt/pleroma
30$ RAILS_ENV=production yarn masto export
31
32   If you run into any permissions issues, chown and proceed. This should
33   export all your Mastodon activity into /home/mastodon/live/migrator.
34   Now, copy the migrator directory into your Pleroma installation path.
35$ cp -r migrator /opt/pleroma
36
37   You can then import all of it into Pleroma (possibly prefixed with sudo
38   -Hu pleroma):
39$ MIX_ENV=prod mix migrator.import
40
41   If all went well, you would've successfully migrated from Mastodon to
42   Pleroma. If not, well feel free to send me an email (or @ me on the
43   fedi). I suppose you could also reach [4]Alex -- he's the incredibly
44   based guy who wrote the migrator, [5]soapbox-fe and does some Elixir
45   magic he keeps [6]posting about.
46
47   Rest assured, the migrator has a 100% success rate -- Alex and I are
48   apparently the only two who have it working. ^2/[2].
49
50why should you migrate?
51
52   Because Pleroma is cleaner, leaner^[7]3 and prettier looking^[8]4. Oh,
53   and we have chats. screenshot of pleroma + soapbox-fe
54     __________________________________________________________________
55
56    1. [9]Erlang install guide
57    2. [10]Elixir install guide
58    3. Mastodon used about ~2.5 GB out of the 4 I have on my Pi. With
59       Pleroma, the total used RAM is only about ~700 MB. That's crazy!
60    4. ...with Soapbox. :^)
61
62References
63
64   1. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:1
65   2. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:2
66   3. https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator
67   4. https://alexgleason.me/
68   5. https://soapbox.pub/
69   6. https://gleasonator.com/@alex
70   7. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:3
71   8. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:4
72   9. http://erlang.org/doc/installation_guide/INSTALL.html
73  10. https://elixir-lang.org/install.html#compiling-from-source-unix-and-mingw