My discourse site has a group that needs to migrate to a different self-hosted Discourse instance, under a different domain. Only the users of that group will go to the new instance. Is it possible to transfer only the private group messages that are in our inbox to the new instance?

What if you converted the PMs into regular topics, move them, them move them back into a PM? Though I’m not sure about the group inbox flow.

I believe you can move regular topics , but for PMs, I don’t think there is currently a way. You may be able to do something with the API or rails console though.

Okay, the list of topical threads in the inbox is not overwhelming, barely 10 threads. I wouldn’t know how to do that with the API. I guess a manual copy will be easier once everyone is registered in the new instance. We’ll just lose the correct timestamps.

If by regular topics you also include "private” regular topics (only visible to a select group), that could be an option. In fact, since the transfer would be to only have a private site accessible only to that select group of people, I wouldn’t need to move them back into a group inbox after the mi…

Will this work even if the authors of the migrated posts do not already have an account in the destination instance? [UPDATE]: the users who authored the topics are also imported with that method. So, that worked well!

Transfering inbox group messages to another instance?

Support Self-hosting

NateDhaliwal (Nate Dhaliwal) March 28, 2026, 12:55am 6

You can move multiple topics.

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Transfering inbox group messages to another instance?

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