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Question about Changing Profile ID
Is it possible to change the profile ID of a 'blog profile only' account and retain followers?
If so, what happens to old tags? Would they redirect to the new ID? i.e. would an old post that tagged @[email protected] link instead to the new handle?
Is it possible to change the profile ID of a 'blog profile only' account and retain followers?
Yes, the ID stays the same, it updates the preferredUsername, webfinger, etc, so it results in an Update activity for the actor, it's not considered a Move.
If so, what happens to old tags?
I pretty sure they end up becoming orphaned, unless you're moving from the default blog user name, which in your case would be @nham.co.uk.
@pfefferle Would it make sense to add the old username to account aliases on update, and include aliases in the pseudo_user_discovery and account lookup to avoid orphaning them?
At the very least, on Instagram, users can view their account creation date, previous usernames, and the number of times they've changed their name within their account information.
However, after Twitter rebranded to X, there have been issues surrounding the rights to official account handles. It raises an important question: Should users be allowed to reclaim their old handles, or should others be able to take those abandoned usernames?
It seems somewhat similar to how phone numbers get reassigned when ownership changes. This creates a potential for confusion, impersonation, or disputes over identity and legacy accounts.
Would it be better for platforms to:
Keep old handles permanently reserved for their original owners?
Or allow them to be recycled after a certain period, like phone numbers?
I think this is an important policy issue for any federated or decentralized social network to carefully consider as well.
Once I've changed blog handle, but when I checked it from other platforms, the updated handle didn’t appear immediately. How long does it usually take for a handle change to propagate across platforms?
Is it possible to change the profile ID of a 'blog profile only' account and retain followers?
Yes, the ID stays the same, it updates the preferredUsername, webfinger, etc, so it results in an Update activity for the actor, it's not considered a Move.
Fantastic
If so, what happens to old tags?
I pretty sure they end up becoming orphaned, unless you're moving from the default blog user name, which in your case would be
@nham.co.uk.
We’d be changing from @[email protected] to something like @[email protected] or @[email protected] (as yet undecided!) so I guess that means in the current iteration of the plugin they’d be orphaned.
@pfefferle Would it make sense to add the old username to account aliases on update, and include aliases in the pseudo_user_discovery and account lookup to avoid orphaning them?
If adding the old username to aliases on update to ensure redirection/avoid orphaning is likely to be in the pipeline then I imagine we will wait for such an update to be implemented before changing the username. 👍
I changed my profile-ID and ended up with no toots in the new profile viewed from mastodon.social, even after one day. So I changed it back and my toots reappeared.
I’ve tested changing the handle on two other sites to see if this works but sadly it doesn’t. Changing the handle in the ActivityPub plugin settings has no effect. The old handle remains the one that posts new content even if it’s been changed here:
Could you tell me more about what doesn't work? How did you determine that?
I can see [email protected] and [email protected] both resolving, with openspurs being the preferredUsername and webfinger.
Interesting. I can confirm that I’m now seeing the same as you. It must take 24 hours or something for the change to take place as when I’d posted this these new handles were still not showing up. However there is now a new issue in that nothing posts to the new handle:
If you got to https://openspurs.uk/ you can see the two most recent posts were me testing if the post federates. (All previous posts did, prior to the handle change.) These two posts ‘should’ show up on the new handle at https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] but they do not. They also do not show up on the old handle at https://mastodon.social/@[email protected].
So it appears that changing handle leaves the site unable to federate.
Screenshots of my settings included:
Ahhhh, so the followers don’t come over? Is there any way of doing that - switching handles and keeping followers? I’m testing it with openspurs because I want to do it in earnest with @[email protected] but I don’t want to lose any of the followers if at all possible…
The problem with the followers seems to be a different one! On WordPress, the followers are tied to the blog-user and because you "only" changed the handle, the Actor is still the same, so the followers should still be there!
What have you tried to do exactly? Was there maybe a user with that handle that has the followers? And you tried to replace it with the blog-actor?
@ethicalrevolution Curious if there are any updates or whether we're good to close this one?
Apologies for taking my time here - just coming back online after a period away. I will look in to this asap and get back to you on it.
Okay … finally got round to testing it and it’s good news.
First error in previous testing was because the account had no followers as @obenland suggested. So this time I ensured the account @[email protected] was a ‘blog profile only’ account as per @pfefferle and had a follower and then I made a test post which successfully federated.
I then changed the handle (keeping it as a ‘blog profile only’ account) to @[email protected], adding ‘@[email protected]’ to the Account Aliases section, and made a second post.
The second post was successfully received by the follower on Mastodon and showed up being by the new handle @[email protected].
Thanks you both for helping me work out how to successfully achieve this. I can now confidently go ahead and do this with the @[email protected] account, for which this testing was for. ☺️
P.S. I don’t use Gravatar (@Jiwoon-Kim) so that issue wasn’t affecting my testing.
I went ahead and changed the handle 24 hours ago, following all of the steps outlined above, but as yet it doesn't seem to resolve on Mastodon. I changed from @[email protected] to @[email protected] but it's still getting a 404 on Mastodon (see screenshots from two accounts).
There did seem to be a delay when we were testing as per the posts above where my August 30th post shows it wasn't resolving yet, but by the time @obenland checked on 5th September it was resolving.
Do you have any idea how long this process should take or if there's anything that can be done to 'bump' it? IN the meantime now new posts on the site are able to federate.
NB: I have made posts since the switch (which haven't yet federated as the new profile is not yet recognised on Mastodon).
Cheers, Sam
Hm, is it possible caching might be interfering here? It doesn't look like the activitypub representation of the homepage is getting served for activitypub requests, instead it returns the regular homepage.
See https://browser.pub/[email protected] and click Debug in the top right.
/cc @pfefferle in case you have additional insights
Potentially. Both this site and the site we tested it on before use Litespeed cache with the same settings. Perhaps that’s why it took a while for the test to work as well. I did already try purging the full cache but I’ll try disabling litespeed and see if that helps.
Doesn’t seem to have made any difference. Should I try changing the handle back to what it was originally to see if that shows up on browser.pub?
Well @[email protected] now exists but we've lost all of our 707 followers.
I've followed the 'new' account to ensure it has 1 follower and made some posts but none of these have federated.
~~Ah, looks like posts are federating after all because someone has replied to a post … just hasn’t yet for my instance yet, which is weird as I was the only follower.~~
~~Phew, federation working is the main thing. Followers we can just do call outs and hope must people see it and follow the new account.~~
Scrap that, the reply wasn't from the Fediverse so I'm not even sure if we are federating or not
Sam! What a rollercoaster. I asked @pfefferle to take another look, he has a better understanding of all the intricacies than me still.
@ethicalrevolution let's try to fix the issue step by step! I checked your blogs user yesterday it it had a different ID then it has now. Have you changed something fundamentally in the meantime (cleaning up the db or removed some settings)? Have you exported/imported the data to reinstall the Blog?
Some infos FYI: Mastodon (and most other platforms) are not very "happy" with username changes, so try to avoid them as best as possible! The username was part of the old WordPress profile IDs, so that made it even worse to change the username! Sadly the account migration process that is used by mastodon, is not very handy when it comes to username changes, that is why we paused this project for a while.
Ha yeh, quite the rollercoaster.
Yes, today I made a fundamental change: I changed to our new database, so that will be why the blog user id has changed. I did that on the basis that the attempted handle change hadn’t worked anyway: On Tuesday morning I had attempted to change the handle but it wouldn’t federate. I then tried reverting it back later on Wednesday but that no longer worked either. As a result of neither working I decided to go ahead and switch the site to our new database anyway to see if that would do anything (thinking perhaps the old database was corrupted somehow (I know it was extremely bloated from the Friends plugin.)) This did appear to make the most progress as it made the new handle actually show up in the Fedi and become followable. However, the followers had disappeared, and publishing posts to Fedi has also not been happening despite the profile now having a Fedi presence.
From the current position what do you think my best option will be now?:
- Backup everything to how it was on Monday before attempting to change anything and try to start the process again.
- See if it’s possible to change the blog user ID on the current set up to what it was on the old set up.
- Something else?
Good news - the posts started federating late last night.
TBH from here I'm not hopeful that restoring Monday's back up would do anything other than cause me a whole lot of work again for nothing, because the profile switch didn't work before I'd reverted to the new database anyway. It behaved differently to how it had done in testing. I have a feeling the old database was corrupted. So now that we're federating (main thing) we'll just put a shout out for people to follow the new handle and hope most of our old followers see it and re-follow us.
So unless you think there's a way we could still somehow port the followers without reverting to a backup by e.g. changing the blog profile ID then I'm happy to take the hit and move on from here.