Migrating to your Polymaths.social account

It’s now time to migrate your Polymaths Alpha account to Polymaths.social! We’ve waiting a long time, but it is finally upon us.

Here’s what you need to know.

Sign Up

First, you’ll need to sign up for an account at Polymaths.social and wait for its approval. In the reason you want an account, be sure to mention the username of your Alpha account so I know it’s you, especially if you are requesting a different username than your Alpha username.

You’ll receive an email to verify your email address; I would go ahead and do this while waiting for approval, so you can hit the ground running.

Approval may take up to 24 hours; I am currently in the UTC+8:00 timezone, so it may take more time for me to respond than you are used to.

Account Setup

Once you’ve got an approved account, log into the Polymaths.social settings panel. Go ahead and set up your profile, likely to match what you have on Polymaths Alpha. A couple settings to be sure and notice:

• Profile ⇒"Manually approve follow requests" - by default, your account is set to require you to approve all follow requests. You may or may not wish to change this.
• Posts ⇒ “Default post privacy” - by default, posts are Unlisted. You will likely want to change this to Public, if you want your posts showing up on the local timeline.
• Posts ⇒ “Default post (and bio) format” - this is where you enable Markdown on your posts!

Import/Export

Now, we’ll import people you follow and the accounts you block from your Polymaths Alpha account. From the Polymaths Alpha settings panel, download following.csv ad blocks.csv. Then, in the Polymaths.social settings panel, import those files.

This should work pretty seamlessly. The other CSVs don’t yet have automatic migration.

Migration

Now for the main migration events: be warned, this is the point of no return.

Here are the relevant dashboard pages:

• Polymaths Alpha - Account Migration Settings
• Polymaths.social - Account Migration Settings

1. On Polymaths.social: set an alias to your Polymaths Alpha account.
2. On Polymaths Alpha: enter https://polymaths.social/users/<your-username> as the Move target URI and enter your password. Then select “Confirm account move” to begin the process.

Over the next few minutes, the two instances will work to move your followers over to your new account. You may want to double check after the process finishes that no-one important got left behind in the move. It’s normal for your follower count to drop a bit; this is usually due to closed/moved accounts that were following you or instance software that asks for approval before moving the follow.

After this action, you will no longer be able to post from your Polymaths Alpha account, but unlike with Mastodon you will still be able to log in to view notifications, bookmarks, ad other things you might want to reference.

Here is the full GoToSocial documentation on account migration.

Conclusion

This should be everything you need to know. Remember that the Polymaths.social Code of Conduct is in effect on the new instance. (This could be a good time for a refresher!)

If you have any problems, you can email me at hello [at] polymaths.social.

The New Year for Polymaths.social: Looking Back and Forward

2023 is now complete, and 2024 is upon us. The last year was a big one for Polymaths.social—we were nothing but a dream before it—and the next year, with our full launch, will be even bigger.

Looking Back

Originally, I wasn’t planning to have anything happening for the project until the impending full launch. Upon the urging of several friends on the Fediverse, though, I decided to launch Polymaths Alpha as a preliminary instance to get a head start on figuring out the technology and community building. It’s been a wild and wonderful ride!

Polymaths.social runs on a fairly new ActivityPub platform: GoToSocial. Our launch timing is mostly dictated by when the GoToSocial project reaches its Beta release. While it’s unfinished at this time, we have all enjoyed the platform very much and are excited to see where it will take us.

Looking Forward

The roadmap of GoToSocial has reaching Beta as set after releases in “Early 2024”—that said, the very next release’s planned features includes the implementation of user account migration, which is one of the biggest blockers for us to launch the main instance, next to a web signup form. With account migration in place, we’d be ready to start migrating our current Alpha users to the main (not yet existing) instance, should I decide to start it up a little earlier than originally planned.

But that’s not the next step. Polymaths Alpha currently runs on an Uberspace account; our hosting is paid through the end of February. At some point in February, I’ll migrate the instance over to my personal Uberspace instance to avoid paying more hosting fees once the main instance is launched.

I do want to keep the Alpha instance up, so people can continue to reference old posts. What I’ll likely do, though, is in some way disable posting. In addition, people will have migrated their accounts away, which should remove follows on the Alpha side, lowering the burden on that server.

Now, to look at what I’m currently envisioning for the final instance’s tech stack:

• A Debian VPS hosted with Contabo. I’ve used them before, and they have a great price-to-performance ratio. The “S” size could easily fit our current size, but I’m considering going with the “M” size to better facilitate us scaling up and to provide some extra capacity to handle all the account migrations we’ll have from the beginning. If it proves more computing power than we need, I could also host some other services for people on the instance with the extra capacity.
• Our current Backblaze Object Storage. Backblaze has worked out pretty well for us, and while I do anticipate the costs going up some as we scale up, I don’t think it’ll be out of our budget within the foreseeable future.
• Porkbun for the domain. Pretty self-explanatory; they’re a good host.
• Attempt to use Backblaze for backups. If I can get our backups working on Backblaze, I’ll do so. That would be pretty cost-effective. I’ll be experimenting with restic as a backup system, which I’ve heard good things about and which can back up to object storage.

Here’s how that works out, cost-wise (all in USD):

• DMCA Registered Agent fee - $6 per 3 years ($0.04/week)
• https://polymaths.social domain name registration - $21.09 per year ($0.41/week)
• Server hosting - Contabo Cloud VPS M - $12.50 per month ($2.88/week)
• Media Storage - Backblaze B2 Cloud - highly unstable - $1.00/week is a safe opening estimate (though definitely an overestimate—this is roughly what we’ve been paying per month so far)

Estimated cost per week: $4.33
Estimated cost per month: $18.83
Estimated cost per year: $225.94

I’ll likely refine this a little as the time draws closer.

And just for fun:

Estimated cost per day: $0.62
Estimated cost per hour: $0.026
Estimated cost per minute: $0.00043
Estimated cost per second: $0.0000072

Why calculate the cost per second? To that I respond, “Why not?”

Here’s to a great 31,622,400-second year.

Introducing News

Finally, after what was truly an unacceptable interval of time, we have both a page for news updates on our site and—what is perhaps more important—an Atom Feed for it!

What to Expect

To begin, this will be a place for updates on the status of the project, with news about new things we’ll be trying to do, updates about issues we’re facing (server outages, community issues, etc.), and announcements. As time goes on, though, you can also expect:

• Us to share visions of where we want Polymaths.social to go
• Potential spotlights of great projects going on in the community (maybe as a regular occurrence? your thoughts are welcomed!)
• Updates on funding and/or calls for community input on how donated funds are used

Other Places to Check

As you’re looking for information, there are some other places that are good to check:

• The Status Page - hosted on a separate server, this page is the place to check for outages of any Polymaths.social services.
• The Polymaths.social Fediverse account - this official account will post smaller updates that aren’t suited for a full post here
• Our Financial Transparency page - this page contains up-to-date details on financial contributions to the project and how that money is spent, regularly pulled from Benjamin’s private Firefly III instance, where he meticulously logs all expenses.

A Brief Update on the Project

It’s been nearly three months now, and we’re incredibly grateful for how great our community’s support has been. Truly, it’s astounding.

For a brief summary of how things have gone:

• We launched Polymaths Alpha, a testing ground for both the GoToSocial software and our community-building experience as we continue prepping for our full launch in early 2024.
• We are already the largest existing GoToSocial instance, according to Fediverse Observer
• We have 36 users with a combined 27,000 status updates—truly amazing!
• After our first call for financial support, your response was overwhelming—over $200 total has been contributed, with over $5/week currently pledged in continuing donations. This is easily enough to launch on a strong footing.

Speaking of the financial situation, we should take a moment to look at that deeper.

First, a point that has been questioned that warrants clarification: for legal/tax reasons I (Benjamin Hollon) currently consider all donations personal gifts and they enter my personal bank account. I then pay for server expenses out of that same bank account.

That said, I intend to put all donated funds toward this project, though I am not legally obligated to do so. So far, I’ve donated excess funds to the GoToSocial team to help fund their amazing development work.

While current donations are enough to keep the lights running once the full instance launches, we’d love to be able to do more, as well as to have a healthy buffer to keep us stable and on secure footing. Here’s our current wishlist, roughly in order of priority:

• Fully cover hosting costs (done!) with room to expand if necessary
• Have a regular additional donation from the community back to GoToSocial’s development—as stated, we’ve begun this but believe the idea should continue and grow
• Be able to host some additional services for our community—one current idea (no promises yet!) is to provide static site hosting for community members, since the kind of people we attract are the same type of people who benefit from having personal/portfolio sites
• Offer financial compensation to our moderation team and staff (including myself, Benjamin), since our time is valuable.
• With available margin, have a budget to fund some community projects. For example, imagine a community literary magazine able to properly pay artists/writers who contribute; that could be an excellent opportunity for many people in our community! This is a pretty far-off goal, though.

If you’re interested in helping us make some of this happen, we would be extremely grateful if you consider helping support us. You can donate our Liberapay team to do so.

Thank You!

Most of all, we want to thank all of you in our community, especially those of you who’ve joined us on Polymaths Alpha, along with everyone who’s been supporting and cheering us on from the sidelines. It’s been wonderful to have such support, and we couldn’t ask for a better cheering squad.

If you have feedback, you can contact us via email at hello[at]polymaths.social. If you’re interested in becoming part of our community, you can sign up for the waitlist to be first in line when we either have open spots in Polymaths Alpha or launch the full instance.

See you all again soon! Don’t forget to add our Atom Feed to your feed reader!