What Happens to Your Mastodon Bookmarks When an Instance Shuts Down (and Why the Archive Survives)

Your Mastodon bookmarks live on the instance you signed up with. If that instance shuts down, your bookmarks are gone with it. The same is true for posts from other instances: if the server that hosted a post goes offline, the post you bookmarked stops loading. The only way to keep them is to save your own copy before that happens.

Why Mastodon instances shut down

A large instance like mastodon.social and a 200-person server run by one person on a Hetzner box are both "an instance." The fediverse treats them the same way, and neither one comes with a promise to stay online. Small servers close when the admin stops paying the bill or gets tired of moderating. People run many of these servers as a hobby, and some of them will stop.

On X, your bookmarks live on X's servers. On Mastodon, they live on whatever server you picked when you signed up. Few people think about that when they join.

Other ways a bookmarked Mastodon post can disappear

A shutdown is the biggest risk, but there are others:

• The author deletes the post.
• Your instance defederates from another instance, and posts from there stop showing up for you.
• The author moves their account to a new instance. Followers move with them, but old posts don't.

None of this is a bug in Mastodon. It's what a network of independently run servers means in practice.

Can I export my Mastodon bookmarks?

Mastodon has an export option in its settings that can include your bookmarks, but it's a list of links to posts. If the server hosting a post goes away, the link goes with it.

Birdfeeder saves the post itself. When you connect your Mastodon account, it imports all your existing bookmarks in one go, so your history is backed up from day one. After that it checks for new bookmarks every 30 minutes and copies the full text and media of each one into your archive. You can export that archive to CSV, TSV, JSON or Excel for free, on any plan. See Mastodon bookmark export and Mastodon bookmark backup.

What happens to my saved copy if the instance goes away?

Nothing. If the instance that hosted a post shuts down tomorrow, your copy in Birdfeeder stays. It's still in your archive and still shows up in search with everything else you saved. You're no longer relying on a server operator you've never met to keep paying for it.

Are my Mastodon bookmarks private in Birdfeeder?

Yes. Mastodon bookmarks are private, and Birdfeeder keeps them that way. You can choose to publish single posts on a public Birdfeeder profile, but that is a separate step you take on purpose. Nothing becomes public on its own.

If you use more than one network

One Birdfeeder account can hold your X, Bluesky, Mastodon and Nostr accounts at the same time. That gives you one search across all your bookmarks, instead of three or four separate lists that each depend on their own platform staying online. There's also a weekly email with what you saved, if you prefer a digest to searching.

Birdfeeder can't stop instances from shutting down. It makes sure that when one does, the posts you bookmarked are already saved somewhere else.