“EXIT” – Export Across Instances Tool
This is a simple and self-contained tool that helps automate the process of exporting your magazine subscriptions from one instance to another, provided you have accounts on both.
Could also be used to copy subscriptions from one named account to another named account on the same instance, or to back them up for later.
Instructions and tool available here
Code runs locally in your browser only.
Cool that this is a thing!
I just gave this a try and I think there’s a potentially worrisome problem, it silently failed on a lot of community subscriptions. The ones that returned HTTP 500 errors were listed in the “fail” list that the importer script generated, but a whole bunch of others returned 404 errors and weren’t listed in either the success or fail lists.
So I advise those running this to pay attention to the error log to avoid losing track of those communities rather than trusting the “fail” list.
I’ll try to reproduce this and look into tightening the error handling. A 404 error should imply that the magazine is not available at the remote. Are those magazines available at the target instance? Agree that those should at least be added to the log–perhaps should add a third category for “Unavailable.” Remember that it will also navigate you to the magazines list at the end for visual confirmation.
When you said community subscription, were you referring to something in particular, or just using this term generically to refer to magazines?
I haven’t tried all of them, but the ones I did check were ones that had not had posts on them at their source instance for quite a while. A few random examples:
- https://kbin.social/m/CampingAndHiking - https://fedia.io/m/CampingAndHiking@kbin.social
- https://kbin.social/m/NonCredibleDefense - https://fedia.io/m/NonCredibleDefense@kbin.social
- https://ttrpg.network/c/bladesinthedark - https://fedia.io/m/bladesinthedark@ttrpg.network
- https://lemmy.ca/c/dnd - https://fedia.io/m/dnd@lemmy.ca
I had 43 failures and 111 successes, so visual inspection wouldn’t really help. I kept copies of the error log and the script output in a text file to figure it out later.
I assume that this means these communities haven’t had activity since fedia.io opened, and so fedia.io doesn’t know they exist? I’ve always wondered how the first person to subscribe to a community on an instance is able to do that.
And yeah, I’m using “community” to refer to “magazine”.
Will this also migrate my blocked lists (instances, magazines, and users)?
If not, does anyone know of a similar tool that will?
I’ve been trying out other kbin/mbin instances since the recent issues with kbin.social’s lack of federation, hoping to open an alt there for backup, but having to manually recreate my block lists isn’t something I’m really wanting to do…No, it does not. Could be added, in theory.
The export process says it has copied subscriptions to the clipboard, but when I paste I just get the code I had pasted in to the browser console. I’m using Safari on macOS.
It’s not a big deal. I don’t mind starting from scratch.
I have made some modifications that should prompt you to click a button to copy the contents to the clipboard, rather than doing it automatically. This is done because Safari only permits modifying the clipboard if there was direct user interaction. Can you try again?
