Hi! Yes, I just changed my name and also my username. Yes, this means what you think it means! But don't worry, I'm still the old person.

I know that diaspora* doesn't have UI support for account migrations yet, but I feel a strong obligation now to document how to make that happen.

All your contacts, all your posts, all your comments etcetc will be transferred to your new account automagically. Your contacts will just see your new profile, and it's almost like nothing changed - except for your name, of course. ❤ The following steps only work if you want to stay on the same pod but change your username - if you want to switch to a different pod, please reach out to me (that's also already possible, but the process is different).

You need to create your new account first, so do that. You need to set all the profile details on your own, but don't bother with adding contacts. Then, tell your podmin to do the rest. Please note that as soon as those steps are complete, your old account will be marked as closed.

As a podmin, you need to open a Rails console (bin/rails c inside the diaspora* directory) and then run a few commands:

# First, we need to load the old and new users from the database
old_user = User.find_by(username: "old_username")
new_user = User.find_by(username: "new_username")

# This creates a manual AccountMigration entity. This would usually be done
# by the importer, but there's no reason we can't do this on our own!
migration = AccountMigration.new(
  old_person:             old_user.person,
  new_person:             new_user.person,
  old_private_key:        old_user.serialized_private_key,
  old_person_diaspora_id: old_user.diaspora_handle,
  archive_contacts:       old_user.contacts
)

# Next, we need to save the AccountMigration entity in the database...
migration.save!

# ... and then run it. This might take a few moments depending on the account!
migration.perform!

I will tag this with #diaspora and #podmin so that people have a chance to see this. Sorry if you feel that's inappropriate, but I don't really care. Also, very special thanks to @Benjamin Neff who helped me with this, since I wasn't very confident in how our migrations actually work. ❤

🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈