Recently, I performed a domain migration from a wordpress.com domain to a self-hosted solution. The primary complaint was the loss of followers gained through WordPress ( http://marygoround.me/2012/02/18/to-all-my-current-wordpress-followers/ )
I don’t see any plugins that Automattic has released to allow similar functionality to “Subscribe” and “Like” content on self-hosted blogs, so it’s feeling more and more like a closed garden.
What can I do to make sure this audience is preserved after the migration?
Self-hosted blogs use RSS for subscriptions.
As far as “liking” goes, that only makes sense within the quasi-social-network environment of WordPress.com.
You cam use http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jetpack/ which is by Automattic and has the desired Subscribe/follow functionallty.
According to Tim Moore, Code Wrangler at Automattic (the company behind WordPress):
Took me a while, but I think you’re referring to people who subscribed to receive an email when a new post is added to your RSS feed. (If you’re talking about subscribing to the RSS feed with a feed reader, then as long as the new site creates posts in the same format as the old one (http://domain name/year/month/date/post) I would think there should be no issue that when a URL is resolved it points to the new page.)
If email is the problem, I found this tip: http://www.redbridgenet.com/wordpress/how-to-export-subscribers-from-wordpress-com/ (I Googled “export wordpress.com email subscribers”). If it’s not … well, then not sure I understand what specifically is not happening. There are lost of plugins out there for connecting up with social networks. I use http://share-and-follow.com/wordpress-plugin/.