TurtleIsland.* instances are for North American Native/Indigenous only.
TurtleIsland.social is a (Twitter-like) Mastodon instance originally established Dec 2022. User registrations are available through the ‘Create Account’ portal at https://TurtleIsland.social/about.
TurtleIsland.rocks is a (Twitter-like) Akkoma instance originally established Dec 2023. User registrations are available through the ‘Registration’ portal at https://TurtleIsland.rocks/registration.
TurtleIsland.buzz is a (Instagram-like) Pixelfed instance originally established March 2024. User registrations are available through the ‘Sign up’ portal at https://TurtleIsland.buzz.
TurtleIsland.* and Allies.* instances are ad-free, corporate-free, bigotry-free, and culture respectful environments for North American Native/Indigenous people and their allies to be in community and safe spaces. Join one, two, three or all four today!
Michelle and Tzipporah, moderators for Turtle Island, a group of Indigenous social media servers need Apple laptops. Michelle doesn’t have a laptop, just a phone and Tzipporah’s laptop is over 7 years old, underpowered for creative work and on its last legs.
Both Michelle and Tzipporah are citizens of the Mvskoke Nation and live on modest artists incomes. They cannot buy graphics and video editing level laptops without our help, so we are crowdfunding to help them.
They need these laptops to support themselves/family with their creativity, and moderate Turtle Island as unpaid volunteers. Please help if you can.
Sunday, September 10, 2023 – TurtleIsland.social moved to professional Mastodon instance hosting, including a complete migration of all the users and content too. So now we can scale to thousands and thousands of users, handle unlimited celebrities or other high impact users. And no more install/upgrade/backup headaches/anxieties for me. I can totally concentrate on the community now.
This will also increase our uptime. No more hour long Wednesday snapshots. All configuration files, media and database storage are backed up daily to a remote secure object storage. In the extremely unlikely event of a system corruption, Turtle Island can be restored fresh in about an hour tops.
Ditto with system upgrades, due to the more surgical nature of the backups, upgrades will be a few minutes at worst. More than likely most upgrades will be a mere blip and not even noticeable.
Turtle Island has six Fediverse instances and one web server. Mastodon, Akkoma, Pixelfed & WordPress run on six virtual private servers.
The TurtleIsland.socialMastodon server is in Masto.host, which is professionally managed Mastodon hosting at its best. This server is scalable to virtually any number of active users, extremely reliable and the most suitable for celebrity or high demand user accounts.
The Allies.socialMastodon server is in Masto.host, which is professionally managed Mastodon hosting at its best. This server is scalable to virtually any number of active users, extremely reliable and the most suitable for celebrity or high demand user accounts.
All remote server access and design work is done with an Apple Mac Studio and an Apple MacBook Pro. Image and graphics editing are done with GIMP and Inkscape.
All the above software is open source. All WordPress plugins used are free versions.
Welcome to this brand new NGINX web server. It has been running great so far, much much better than Apache. Still working on optimum configurations though. The content from IndigenousCreatives.social has been moved here, and much new content is planned.
So glad to be getting rid of racist jerks Apache Software Foundation products. Appropriation of Native people and names for products is not cool. I’m glad I have a better option. Sorry, I took this long to completely ditch Apache software.
I have used Apache since sometime in the 2nd half of the 1990’s. I had to compile it myself for whatever version of Unix at that time. Software distribution has come a long way since those days, ha! So here we are – NGINX moving forward.
Migrating your Mastodon account to a new instance can be scary if you have never done it before, but it is relatively simple
For starters, I recommend doing this using a browser on a desktop/laptop computer. If you must use a mobile device, use a browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari or whatever. Do not use one of the myriad of Mastodon mobile apps. At least this way you will be assured of the same basic functions as described in this tutorial.
It can be very helpful if you have the luxury of two computers, two monitors, or two browser windows (not tabs), one for your old instance and one for your new TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social instance.
There are essentially 5 steps. These steps must be done in order. You can do these steps one after the other in a single browser, logging in and out as needed, or back and forth between two browsers, monitors or computers that you are logged into both instances at the same time.
It is important to note, you cannot migrate your posts. Maybe in a future version you will be able to, but not for now. Personally, I think old posts are of negligible value. You will also gain traffic and followers from re-posting your best content. Your followers will automatically migrate. Your follows, blocks, mutes, domain blocks, and bookmarks can be downloaded and re-uploaded quite easily. Lists can be downloaded but will have to be manually added to your new account.
2. On your old Instance/Server account: Export/Download: follows, blocks, mutes, domain blocks, bookmarks, lists
3. On your new TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social account: Import/Upload: follows, blocks, mutes, domain blocks, bookmarks
4. Still on your new TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social account: Go to Account -> Moving FROM a different account Enter old account’s handle
5. On your old Instance/Server account: Go to Account -> Move TO another account Enter new account’s handle
That’s it! Depending how many followers you have, it can take an hour or more for all your followers to migrate over to your TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social account. Depending on the system resources and load, there may be freezes, slow downs, or messages. If there are, just leave it alone while it does its thing and all will be fine.
The detailed version
1. Sign up for a new account on TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social
Go to https://TurtleIsland.social/about or https://Allies.social/about and click the ‘Create Account’ button in the right upper side of the screen. The rest should be self-explanatory. Waiting for account approval is probably the most time consuming part of this process. Depending what time of the day/night you create an account and the availability of admins/moderators, account activation can take as little as 5 minutes or as long as multiple hours. Unfortunately as a semi-private instance, this is unavoidable to keep Nazis, bigots and other losers out. In the end you benefit.
2. On your old Instance/Server account:
From your profile page, click on ‘Preferences’ on the right lower menu. In the next screen click on ‘Import and export’ on the left menu. Be sure ‘Data export’ is highlighted on the left menu.
Now on the right side of the screen, you can click each of the CSV icons to download Follows, Lists, You block, You mute, Domain blocks, and Bookmarks (if it is more than 0) to download the files.
3. On your new TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social account:
From your profile page, click on ‘Preferences’ on the right lower menu. In the next screen click on ‘Import and export’ on the left menu. Be sure ‘Import’ is highlighted on the left menu. You can only import one file at a time.
Select: Merge or Overwrite. Ordinarily Merge is fine.
Choose file: Select file previously exported. Be sure it matches Import type selected.
4. Still on your new TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social account:
Still in ‘Preferences’, click on ‘Account’ (above ‘Import and Export’) on the left menu. Be sure ‘Account settings’ is highlighted on the left menu.
Scroll down
Near bottom of page, in ‘Moving FROM a different account’:
Select ‘create an account alias’
Enter OLD account’s handle
5. On your old Instance/Server account:
Near bottom of page, in ‘Move TO a different account’:
Select ‘configure it here’
Next:
Enter ‘Handle of the NEW account’
Enter ‘Current password’ (of the OLD account you are currently logged into)
Ok, now here is where there is no turning back, you will not be able to use your OLD account after this. This is irreversible: ‘MOVE FOLLOWERS’
That’s it! Depending how many followers you have, it can take an hour or more for all your followers to migrate over to your TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social account. Depending on the system resources and load, there may be freezes, slow downs, or messages. If there are, just leave it alone while it does its thing and all will be fine.
I hope this helps. If you are migrating to TurtleIsland.social or Allies.social and still need help, don’t hesitate to reach out to me.
Michelle Joy Gallagher Soffe is an author of poetry and prose from Sacramento, CA. With an affinity for astronomy and physics, she often makes correlations between the corporeal and the cosmos. She is the author of the book Disremembering, a volume of poetry about love and loss available on Amazon or direct from her at nihtgengapress.com
Moderator – Admin – Web Developer Mvskoke Nation citizen
Yehuda Rothschild is retired after over 35 years in Information Technology. Now he is mostly the under the hood server guy for TurtleIsland.* and Allies.* Fediverse instancess, as well as general big mouth. He is working hard to fight racism, and seek land, digital and financial justice for Indigenous people, strengthen reconnecting Natives, and educate allies.
