(fallen london stamps by whoa what somehow I succeeded at migrating the managed install of akkoma onto my own VPS... without breaking everything????
one really, really, really awkward thing about activitypub instances is that if you spin up an instance at a domain and then decide you want to move hosts (or god help you, software), you're kind of fucked unless you really know how to touch computers. this is because (very simplified explanation) whenever instances talk to each other, they exchange secrets that they then save in their databases and consult whenever they talk again
this is, generally, a good idea - it means that no one can come in and impersonate people! but it also means that if you lose those secrets, you're kinda hosed. like, say, if you start anew but want to use the same domain
I went to great pains to copy over the contents of the database on the old version of the instance, so now I guess we wait and see if it worked