I have finally completed my migration of all of my picture posts to my GoToSocial instance. The first post goes all the way back to 2012 when I created an Instagram account which I migrated to Pixelfed years later. But frustrated with some aspects of Pixelfed at the time I bounced around servers and platforms till I finally bit the bullet and created a personal instance. Unfortunately, there were many hurdles to combining my multiple accounts into one place until I found the right combination of tools: GoToSocial, Posty, and slurp.

After multiple successful archive imports, garbage collection for the imported posts I didn’t wish to save, and a few outstanding account closures; I was down to a few hundred Pixelfed posts that wouldn’t import via that tool chain because of the existing at-mentions and slurp’s strict handling of these to prevent spam. I finally took the time to work through the pixelfed-statuses.json with a little regex to invalidate the existing at-mentions searching on (?<!\/)@ and replacing with ඞ. It looks a little awkward, but this helped maintain the context of the old Instagram mentions with @cbhaugen becoming ඞcbhaugen. I tried a number of other replacements, but found that this one worked consistently and still looked like the at-sign. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover the ＠ (Full-width Commercial At / U+FF20) and ﹫ (Small Commercial At / U+FE6B) til after completing the import. So if you’re in a similar predicament you may try those instead of ඞ (Sinhala Letter Kantaja Naasikyaya / U+0D9E).

@gotosocial@superseriousbusiness.org @vyr @oli
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