The Fediverse replicates one of my real world pet peeves, the conflation of mailing address with physical location.
Every year, my wife sends out Christmas cards and we have to recheck everyone's mailing addresses, because people move. But why should moving change your mailing address? A mailing address could be some other identifier than a street address. The postal service could maintain a mapping that we could change whenever we move. Mail would never again go to an outdated location. Most people want to "send mail to Alan, wherever he happens to be", not "send mail to a given house and hope Alan resides there".
The Fediverse is similar. I chose Qoto as my initial home because I liked some of the decisions they made in setting up the instance. But now my identity is tied to Qoto. There are mechanisms to migrate, but they involve telling everyone my new location.
#Fediverse #Mastodon @identity
@acjay just saw this again and remembered:
if you have your own website you can put the contents of https://qoto.org/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:acjay@qoto.org at /.well-known/webfinger (i.e. https://example.com/.well-known/webfinger) and then if someone tries to find @(whatever)@(your website) (i.e. @acjay@example.com) it will show them your profile on qoto
and then if you move, you can just replace the webfinger file on your website with the contents of your new server’s webfinger?resource=acct:newaccount@new.server
1/2
@acjay 2/2 so that’s a way to have a handle that always posts to your current account so that you don’t have to update it everywhere if you move
@april Multiple domains on one server is one of the things I'm hoping for here. Last I saw, it was an open ticket, but it was unclear to me whether it was happening.
Look, I get that a lot of things "kind of" work here, but I also feel that there probably needs to be an elegant separation of identity and hosting in order for the Fediverse to support the migration of a lot of the usages that people rely on Twitter for. I think the goal should be "better than Twitter" + "better than email".
@acjay and? people can still find you with that domain and once they follow you it doesn't matter anymore
anyways, this will probably get better once they add having multiple domains on one server, since then you could have mastodon on your own domain without hosting a whole mastodon server yourself