escaping the matrix.org

due to reasons i’ve decided to migrate away from the matrix.org homeserver (to https://catgirl.cloud)

not that the decision to charge for the homeserver is a bad one imo. but matrix.org is one hell of a form of centralisation in matrix (in a few rooms i checked with /devtools and looking at “View servers in room”, matrix.org consists of between 50% and 70% of the users. meanwhile, judging by the number of boosts of a mastodon.social account post, it’s closer to 5%. not that mastodon.social isn’t a form of centralisation, but i feel it’s a lot less extreme)

ultimately they should close registrations and help people find a matrix server to use instead, and work on tooling to make migration easier (you should be able to just sign in to the source and destination in your client and have everything be migrated, including the annoying bits like E2EE keys)

on migration: i followed Migrate Your Existing Matrix Account, The Harder but Safe Way!. catgirl.cloud provides a web Element client, so it was a matter of having desktop element (old account) and web element (new account) and sending invites in every DM. Due to reasons (ratelimiting? homeserver slowness?), invites were not particularly fast, so this was by far the slowest process. since the room name changes when there’s actually 3 users in it, it’s pretty easy to see which DMs haven’t been invited yet.

just keep inviting your new account to every DM (and maybe take the opportunity to clean up old DMs with spammers by just leaving) until the new account is in every DM you care about (and has op!). it’s helpful to do that in 2 steps so you can just copy paste the invite command in every room.

once you’re and checked that you migrated all the DMs correctly, you can just leave them from your old account. this will fix the name display since there’s now only 2 users in it.

at some point you’ll want to migrate your E2EE keys. (this post isn’t intended as a replacement to that guide, just go follow it, it works)

as mentioned in the comments of the post: you can use /converttodm instead of fucking with account data json.

one thing this will fuck up is the sort by activity, since the invite counts as activity. no clue how to fix this, but it’ll sort itself out as the DMs are used from the new account anyways so i don’t really care. likewise with older messages displaying as if they were sent from “not you” (which is true, they weren’t sent from your current account), so reading chat can be a bit confusing. again, eh, that only affects scrollback.

unrelatedly: it’s so fucking warm here. having a fan blowing “cold” air from outside into my room kinda helps but it’s still 29c indoors according to my thermostat. and i’m fucking suffering. send help.

weather forecast says highs of 31 outside in a few days so that’ll be fun.