Ouff!

After the 2 cloudflare-outages this year, which led to me not being able to access any of my matrix-chats (as i my account was @matrix.org) i was happy to having found a new matrix-homeserver @fsfe.org since i became a supporter this year. But…

How painful can it be to migrate to a new account?!

I mean, the data is all there. But as i am trying to be a dev myself i fully understand that certain feature are just not top-priority for the matrix-element-team. So, here is what i did following this lovely tutorial by someone who went through the same painful experience before me.

  1. Create new account @blabla:newhome.org (old account: @blabla:oldhome.org).

  2. In direct message rooms, or rooms where you are allowed to enter /-commands at the msg-prompt enter /invite @blabla:oldhome.org Account Migration logged in in your old account. This simply makes inviting you new self faster, imho. If you are not allowed to execute commands you have to click an invitation or copy the room link and open it in another Matrix instance where you logged in with your new account.

  3. After accepting the invitation from your new account, in direct msg / or rooms where your old account is admin run /op @blabla:fsfe.org 100

  4. Make your old account leave the rooms where the new account now has successfully joined by running /part or clicking on Leave Room.

  5. Sadly, the DM (DirectMessages) chats will now be group chats, as there temporarily have been more than 2 participants. In order to fix that run /devtools copy the internal room link, go to Explore account data -> m.direct. There you might find json that looks like this:

     {
   "@blabla:newhome.org": [],
   "@blabla:oldhome.org": [
     "!BzgPnypAbKBhxTLlFI:matrix.org"
   ]
 }

    According to the Matrix Spec the m.direct spec is a map storing information about which rooms are considered DM-rooms. So all we need to do here is add the room ID of the DM-chat to the list of DM-rooms belonging to the newhome-account. Say, !TzgPyzpAbKbhxTplfI:matrix.org is the current DM-chat-roomlink then the result after editing should look like this (also did cleanup the oldhome stuff):

     {
   "@blabla:newhome.org": [
     "!TzgPyzpAbKbhxTplfI:matrix.org",
     "!BzgPnypAbKBhxTLlFI:matrix.org"
   ]
 }

    This is about it. TODO: I would really love to write a script for that. Or some other tool making this simpler. Maybe some day 🐧