Instances can go down, disappear or be unresponsive due to many reasons.
Go to your account settings now and export your account settings!
This file contains your subscriptions, follows, profile settings etc. It’s very easy to start over on a new instance when you have your export file.
Back it up, export it, save it, repeat occasionally.
Or you know, just embrace impermanence.
☝️
you guys get too serious about social media. just let the whole thing burn. youll register another temp email the next day and browse the same 3 active subs.
One of the most surprising things about developing for the fediverse is different social media users use social media very differently.
I follow like 50 communities I will never get exposed to again, because I switched instances already.
Great idea, one of those retrospectively obvious ideas that never occurred to me!
This simply needs to automatically happen every week or so.
How though? A website cannot just access your hard drive and write stuff, as far as I know.
There’s a file api you can use to interact with the file system directly. Practically, I’m not sure how much it would help, since you could only access it with permission while the website is open, and there’s no way to sync between devices, but it is hypothetically possible to write a feature that backs up your settings periodically.
How about a desktop client?
Actually it can. Cookies, local storage … but using that for backups would certainly be an idea I haven’t heard before.
Wait, doesn’t every website do this? Or are there websites that only live in RAM?
No websites should be able to access anything on your hard drive arbitrarily.
Websites can ask the browser to store something in cookies, or local db storage; it can even say “here’s a file for download”. But it cannot just decide to place a download somewhere in your filesystem.
The browser itself is accessing your filesystem to read and write cookies, cache, etc. and the website has (rightfully so) zero control over that, other than asking permission and offering up a link to something the browser may to may not decide what to do with.
Didn’t claim arbitrary access, just writing to hard drive. But I see, so the browser is the mediating layer
Automate a script to do it. It’s easier to make simple automations than most people would think
Is there a way to do this in Voyager?
No, you can only backup your Voyager settings from the app.
Settings -> general -> backup and restore settings
This is different from the account backup and only includes voyager settings.
