I grew up in a very rural area of the southern U.S. back in the 80s. The internet wasn’t quite a thing yet, so my window to the world outside my small town was our mailbox, located at Rural Route Box 464. I had pen pal letters, catalogs, magazines and comic books delivered in the mail and it was pure joy to run down the dusty road and check for something new every day.

The internet became my new window to the world, so it just seemed natural to use “Box464” as my address. Even got the domain!

I noticed today when setting up a “Fediverse” collection, that another collection already existed with that name. When I went to view my collection, it was showing the other /fediverse collection instead. I changed my name to “FediNews” and that cleared it up.

So, going to https://kbin.social/u/box464/c/Fediverse goes to the other /fediverse collection - actually it still does! Not sure how that is happening since I don’t have that name reserved now.

Sharkey and Firefish both offer this, tho they handle it a bit differently. Those two are “built in” and the idea is that the imported posts don’t federate, they just get imported with you. You would lose favorites, boosts, and in most cases, reply history. Sharkey states they are able to import replies as well for Mastodon and Twitter, but I haven’t seen it in action yet (just came out this week).

Firefish - Import from other firefish instances, mastodon. I don’t know for sure, but I assume IceShrimp has this as well.

I tried Firefish, and it did work for my very small collection of posts from another instance.

Sharkey - Import from Misskey/Firefish, Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Sharkey states that for the Mastodon flavors and Twitter, replies to your posts are also imported (?) Not sure how that works.

If you have some technical background, there’s another option, Mastodon Content Mover tho it does “spam” your posts, so be sure to use this BEFORE you import or add followers. Just like the other options, replies, likes, boosts, etc. aren’t included. It’s written in Java.

Elk, the Mastodon web client, has an excellent development setup with good documentation and solid leadership. There’s lots of little fediverse startups. I’ve submitted some pull requests to Postmarks, a federated bookmark manager. It’s very early stages and fun to be part of that!