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Fediverse Moving over the Face of the Waters

December 3, 2022 by Jay Cuthrell

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This is an early edition of Fudge Sunday where we we take a look at moving a newsletter from Substack to Buttondown and from Twitter to Mastodon.

Music: *Moby - “God Moving over the Face of the Waters” (1995)*

Getting Informed

*Record scratch* *Freeze frame*

Yup, that’s my newsletter arriving a full day early. You’re probably wondering how we ended up in this situation.

Subscriber asks: *Why is this newsletter moving? Again?*

Subscriber asks: *Wait, Twitter? Didn’t you* *stop using it in 2017**?*

That’s right. To explain, I’m going to play back a recent thread from my new Mastodon account on my new self-hosted Mastodon single-user instance.

Last month I learned that my cutover from Revue to Substack came at a cost.^[1]

*Today I learned the default sharing link for Substack app does not use my cu$tom domain.😳*

*sunday.fudge.org* *swaps to* *open.substack.com/pub/fudge* *instead.🤔*

*This design choice is enough to make me reconsider my migration to Substack…. just 6 months after leaving Revue (Twitter).😂*

*Maybe I need to try and roll my own?🤷‍♂️*

*Or, do I test Buttondown first?🤷‍♂️*

*Thank you for attending my 500 char TED talk.🤓*

Over several days I would find out Substack URL handling actually was going to involve more time to migrate away from than I understood 6 months ago. Eventually, I made a decision that involved consolidation and investment.^[2]

*I think I’m going to punt… on a couple fronts and simplify this.*

*Punt: Netlify blog (**fudge.org**)*

*Punt: Substack newsletter (**sunday.fudge.org**)*

*Plan: Move everything to Buttondown as the new simplified* *fudge.org*

*Migrate: My blog posts (mdx but mostly markdown)*

*Migrate: My newsletter posts to see how awful the export/import turns out to be getting off of Substack or prior archives from Revue, wget, curl, etc…*

So, if you are reading this… the migration was a success.

To get my newsletter migrated and able to post this update I performed the following steps:

Go to Substack -> Dashboard -> Settings -> Exports -> Create new export
Wait for Substack confirmation email to arrive indicating the export completed
Download Substack export (zip file)
Go to Buttondown Settings Importing to upload the Substack export (I ended up sending a support ticket, YMMV)
Confirmed successful import
Completed a Stripe purchase for Buttondown Standard for up to 5000 subscribers 🤓
Did lots of DNS updates for my cu$tom domain and updated Buttondown Fancy Stuff and wait for propagation (in my case Cloudflare)
Customized Buttondown Newsletter
Go to Buttondown Settings Importing to upload the Substack subscriber export
Wait for Buttondown approvals of the subscriber import
Played around with drafts, formatting, customizations, etc.

Leaving The Bird for The Mastodon

I’ve avoided active use of Twitter for at least 5 years. So, while my account(s) are still up there is no content associated with them.

As I’ve written previously^[3] on the topic of Twitter, this wasn’t like I was giving up anything to stop using Twitter. In fact, I missed what Twitter was back in 2007… a bit more civil and a bit less of that old Yogi Berra platitude due to the insufferable bot crowding.

Since I haven’t operated cuthrell.com as an active web property, it seemed like the best vanity domain to host a single-user instance of Mastodon. Plus, I already had a Linode VPS that was available and up to the task.

To get on the Fediverse I performed the following steps:

Followed the basic Linode community recipe with personal choices along the way (naming conventions)
Added back my .well\_known directory of files for Keybase proofs, etc… to the html root for nginx
Added my new Mastodon handle to my Twitter profile
Used Glitch hosted Fedifinder to poll my Twitter Lists, Followers, and export folks
Used my Mastodon import function from the Fedifinder export
Waited for others to follow me back or appear over the next 24-48 hours appearing in my timeline
While I waited it got me thinking about migrating my newsletter away from Substack

COUNTA of Mastodon Instances.png

And here we are with a few broken links, redirects to be done, and a lot of fun along the way! 🤓

What breaks next in my quest for a Markdown + Email + Blog + ActivityPub?

Until then… Place your bets!

birds

Disclosure

I am linking to my disclosure.

At the time I wasn’t planning to attempt this migration before the next issue of Fudge Sunday but here we are. ↩︎
Actually, Gatsby Cloud not Netlify, but I digress. ↩︎
But that’s for another post once I take down sunday.fudge.org once and for all as a site that only performs HTTP 301 until I see traffic fall off completely. ↩︎

Topics:

buttondown fediverse mastodon newsletter substack twitter

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