Partnership with ATProtocol Community Fund!
We’re pleased to announce we’ve received a grant of $5000 USD from the ATProtocol Community Fund to assist us in improving the migration experience for our users and the “ATmosphere” at large. There are four main initiatives that this funding will help us with:
- Testing and Finalizing our PDS Migration Tool and Website
- Crafting an Educational Animatic to explain PDS Migration
- Securing pre-requisite insurance coverage to cover our cooperative and users
- Assisting the first few waves of invitees migrating to our PDS
Alpha Testing our Migration Tools
We’re in the process of testing our migration tools, which includes a downloadable and a web-hosted version. Our downloadable tool can be found on our GitHub page, and has been improving steadily with user testing. This tool is more of a “swiss army knife” of various tools that you can use to backup your account, migrate between PDSes, generate rotation (recovery) keys, and even find and restore missing blobs after a migration. We recently helped a Blacksky user retrieve their missing blobs and restore all the media to their profile using our tool!
The web-hosted version of our migrator will be a simple linear flow website that walks you through the PDS migration process. We aim for this to be as user-friendly as possible, while also encouraging you to backup your account and generate a rotation key as you go! We expect that this will be the way the majority of our users migrate, as opposed to using the downloadable tool. So we’re taking our time to make sure it works reliably and is easy to use.
PDS Migration Animatic and FAQ
When Bluesky denizens first learn about Northsky, they often think they’re going to have to sacrifice their following and start over on our platform. This is a fair assumption to make, because there’s no real equivalent to the way Bluesky and ATProtocol handles user accounts out there in the existing social media (cinematic) universe! Not to mention, marginalized communities have had to fracture and move platforms repeatedly to evade discriminatory bans and neglectful moderation for years. Those who have used mastodon are familiar with this struggle when migrating to a new server.
It’s no shock that subscribers are relieved to hear that you can keep your posts, likes, following, lists, and more when you move to Northsky. You can keep chatting with users on Bluesky, Blacksky, and individually posted PDSes. This is something new to social media users, and something we hope to help explain with a ~2 minute animatic. This resource will be aimed at the everyday social media user and not tech savvy developers.
We’re also building an accompanying FAQ that goes into more precise technical detail and answers more questions than we possibly could in such a short explainer video. We hope these resources in concert answer most questions the average or even enthusiast user might want to know. Who knows, maybe it will inspire people to host their own PDS or even start an ATProtocol project of their own!
Insurance and Assistance Migration
We take the longevity of Northsky very seriously, and we’re securing insurance to both protect the cooperative and our users. We see this as a necessary pre-requisite to taking real user data onto our PDS, because we want to be covered in the event of a myriad of potential issues including regulatory compliance, cyber incidents, data loss, and more. We’re serious about treating our community with the care that we need and rarely receive.
We also know that edge cases will arise with migrations. We’ll do our best to make sure everyone has a smooth experience, but we also want to be able to offer migration support to users who need it. Just like the example we mentioned above where we were able to use our downloadable migration tool to recover a user’s blobs, we want to budget for a certain amount of hands-on support as needed as we move subscribers over to Northsky’s PDS.
