04 September, 2020

Migrating from Mastodon to Pleroma

Mastodon bad. Pleroma good.

   If you've been following me on the fediverse, you would've witnessed my
   numerous (failed) attempts at migrating from Mastodon to Pleroma,
   running on my Raspberry Pi. I finally got it working, and these are the
   steps I took. It's sort of a loose guide you could follow, but I can't
   promise it'll work for you.

   The Erlang and Elixir packages are pretty broken and outdated on
   Raspbian. So this time, I built them from source.^[1]1^[2]2 I also
   assume you have Mastodon and Pleroma (source, not OTP) installed --
   probably at /home/mastodon/live and /opt/pleroma, respectively.

   Once you have Erlang and Elixir compiled and sitting in your PATH, pull
   [3]soapbox-pub/migrator. Now read the readme and the do_migration.sh
   script to get an idea of what you're getting into.

   Move into the cloned directory and create a .env:
MASTODON_PATH=/home/mastodon/live
PLEROMA_PATH=/opt/pleroma

   Then, run:
$ yarn   # install deps
$ cp -r mastodon/* /home/mastodon/live
$ cp -r pleroma/* /opt/pleroma
$ RAILS_ENV=production yarn masto export

   If you run into any permissions issues, chown and proceed. This should
   export all your Mastodon activity into /home/mastodon/live/migrator.
   Now, copy the migrator directory into your Pleroma installation path.
$ cp -r migrator /opt/pleroma

   You can then import all of it into Pleroma (possibly prefixed with sudo
   -Hu pleroma):
$ MIX_ENV=prod mix migrator.import

   If all went well, you would've successfully migrated from Mastodon to
   Pleroma. If not, well feel free to send me an email (or @ me on the
   fedi). I suppose you could also reach [4]Alex -- he's the incredibly
   based guy who wrote the migrator, [5]soapbox-fe and does some Elixir
   magic he keeps [6]posting about.

   Rest assured, the migrator has a 100% success rate -- Alex and I are
   apparently the only two who have it working. ^2/[2].

why should you migrate?

   Because Pleroma is cleaner, leaner^[7]3 and prettier looking^[8]4. Oh,
   and we have chats. screenshot of pleroma + soapbox-fe
     __________________________________________________________________

    1. [9]Erlang install guide
    2. [10]Elixir install guide
    3. Mastodon used about ~2.5 GB out of the 4 I have on my Pi. With
       Pleroma, the total used RAM is only about ~700 MB. That's crazy!
    4. ...with Soapbox. :^)

References

   1. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:1
   2. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:2
   3. https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator
   4. https://alexgleason.me/
   5. https://soapbox.pub/
   6. https://gleasonator.com/@alex
   7. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:3
   8. https://icyphox.sh/home/icy/leet/site/build/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/temp.html#fn:4
   9. http://erlang.org/doc/installation_guide/INSTALL.html
  10. https://elixir-lang.org/install.html#compiling-from-source-unix-and-mingw