Reading about how Bluesky invented this amazing thing....
While many competitors sought to replicate the traditional centralized model, Graber remained steadfast in her commitment to the AT Protocol. This underlying technology allows users to own their data and move their digital identities between different providers, a concept known as federation.
Wow, Bluesky, as the very first company to ever explore decentralization, ever, you must have run into some really novel problems in this space, being the first ones to ever do this, you know. I'll bet you had to coin all sorts of new phrases for things, like "federation."
contentious opinion: we already have nomadic identity
I dunno, I feel like Mastodon already has nomadic identity, it's just that there's a forwarding service between instances. But it will in fact direct those with old references to your profile to a new location. There's a migration process to pull over your social graph. Depending on the platform (cough, GoToSocial) you can even bring your posts with you.
The fact that you can't keep the same identity on a host owned by someone else forever is hardly a downside, imo. What's magic, if you've never experienced it, is the day you're following someone and you see they changed their avatar, or you go to their profile and you realize that they are not on their old instance anymore, they've migrated. They did it without fanfare or announcement, and yet I never even noticed because I was still following them and receiving their posts.
It's nomadic identity in the truest decentralized fashion. You claim your identity (I'm here@here) and if it changes, you update it in places you display it and you can set up a forwarding address to your new location....
...The new place your data is hosted.
Like your data has to be hosted somewhere, and we're not sending it to a big centralized public firehose, that would be ridiculous and silly, so I don't get what else we expect here.
We have the ability to move servers and bring our followers with us, and reproduce the same exact Home feed (via our follow list) along with our blocks and mutes and bookmark imports.
We functionally already have nomadic identity.
You just don't like how it works.
