Just tested migrating my profile with all my followers from one peer to another on Secure Scuttlebutt social network

https://bit.ly/3gHYzHr

I’ve been scaling down my iPhone usage and migrating many apps back to an Android phone. Normally this is not an issue for centralised social networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, etc or for decentralised federated networks like Mastodon or Pixelfed. All these services keep your posts online on their servers, as well as all your connections to followers.

If some services like Twitter, a particular Mastodon instance you belong to, etc suddenly shuts down, you’ve lost your posts and followers. It is often not easy to migrate (with everything intact from one server to another) although Hubzilla has been way ahead of everyone with its Nomadic profiles.

But with peer-to-peer social networks all your data, posts, followers, etc is kept on your OWN device. For some networks that means losing everything if you lose your local data. But Secure Scuttlebutt also backs up your data between connected friend nodes. So in theory if you can paste in your long recovery key for your profile, you can recover your data, followers, etc on a new device.

So today I installed the Manyverse app for Secure Scuttlebutt onto my Android phone, pasted in my recovery code, and it started recovering all my posts, followers, etc from other peers I had been connected to recently. It took a little while and then reindexed everything, and I was back! It is completely transparent to any of my followers. I’m just back, like I was before, but on a different device, with zero servers or any central service providing this migration.

More about how Manyverse does this for SSB at https://www.manyver.se/faq/