Are you an Anime Blogger or Creator who Review Japanese Media? Here is why you Should Join Sakurajima and How to Move your Account

With Twitter being a sinking ship, you have heard about Mastodon and the Fediverse as alternatives. I knew that it won’t go well when Elon Musk bought Twitter. That is why I created Sakurajima.

Why Sakurajima if you are an Anime Blogger or Creator who Reviews Japanese Media?

Back in the late 2000s and 2010s, the Anime Blogging scene was strong. There was also a site called AnimeBlogger.net, which hosts blogs for free and has a community. They had forums and a feed tracker showing the latest blog posts. Sadly, Social Platforms caused a decline in anime blogs as people decide to talk about anime on Twitter and/or Facebook.

With Twitter being beyond repair as Elon Musk runs it through the ground, it becomes essential not to use platforms that billionaires can buy and ruin. After all, anime blogs are run by individuals, so why not a social network. Mastodon makes it possible to create a social network. It allows people to join and connect with other people on the same server and other servers thanks to ActivePub, the protocol that powers the fediverse. Best of all, there are no ads, algorithms, or tracking, and your data is yours.

So why join or move to Sakurajima instead of Mastodon.social or most prominent instances? It’s best to join a small or medium instance as there is better moderation, and it fits more to your main interests. Smaller and medium instances tend to block many problematic instances, especially since moderation resources are limited. There may be a little lenient and only ban the most problematic ones or limit (servers whose contents won’t appear in the Federated timeline) them and just ban individual bad actors.

Also, performance on smaller to medium instances tends to have better performance since they are not as overloaded. Also, some instances (e.g.,urusai.social) do not allow self-promotion, which we do since we are geared more toward Anime Bloggers and their readers. We also have multiple themes and make it easy to transition from Twitter to Mastodon with an easy mode client.

The gist is that you should pick the best instance that works best for you and that you can trust in hosting your data. Moving instances comes at a cost, as you can’t move your content. Smaller, medium, or going the DIY route and making your own is ideal if you have the know-how. Centralization to large instances is not ideal and will eventually create the same situation as Twitter, as large instances are hard to moderate effectively.

You can join us at https://sakurajima.moe

Moving your Followers Over

If you want to move to Sakurajima, you can move your followers over using the migration feature in Mastodon. Moving your content is not possible, although you can export it. It’s advised to keep your old account active so users can see it unless you want to remove it.

Before following these steps, create an account at https://sakurajima.moe first.

1. On the old instance, click Preferences and look for the Moving from a different account. You want to create an account alias.

2. Specify your old account and create an alias.

The old handle should now appear in the list.

3. Go to your old instance, click Preferences and look for the Move to a different account. Click the “configure it here” link

4. Type in your new account handle and your password to your old account. Then click Move Followers

5. It will take time, but your followers should move over. You can always move back to the old account by reactivating it and using the same procedures.