One among a growing list of issues Mastodon seems to have built into its functionality:
- if you change servers, your old posts effectively disappear.
The main tangible value of the "Fediverse" is that you control your data.
Apparently, though, as we see with the #MastodonLOL debacle, that's not true.
There need to be simply and transparently better alternatives, where "transparent" means your data travels with you and is easily accessible by you, anywhere you choose to be present online.
@onlybrownmastodon i'm a noob to fediverse stuff, but would this be possible with some alternative to mastodon that offered migrating posts? or a fork of mastodon? or is the idea of migrating posts not supported by the protocol?
@_benui A pedantic troll spent several comments here 'splaining that migrating your posts _is_ actually "trivial" to do (meaning, easy for an expert, difficult/impossible for non-experts)...
...but only if you own the server.
Which means practically speaking, no, there's no way to migrate your posts from one Mastodon server to another (unless you have an extra server laying around).
The question becomes: what's the point of Mastodon if you don't control your data?
At least it's not Twitter?
@onlybrownmastodon Yeah that seems like it would be a really important feature.
Ahaha looking on the github issues right now, what's the newest-created issue...?
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23522
@onlybrownmastodon
Sounds like it would require the sending and receiving servers to send hundreds of updates (all wrapped in mega-inefficient JSON) to migrate possibly thousands, or tens of thousands of posts.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23522
@_benui Mastodon is designed as a set of walled gardens. It's the same reason why search functionality doesn't work properly, and why timelines are trapped on individual servers (you can only see the timeline on the server where you're logged in), etc.
It's the same trap most open-source software falls into, repeatedly: technical cleverness by programmers/designers wins over practical usefulness for the humans using the software, every time.
My reaction goes the other way: when I looked into Mastodon and the underlying ActivityPub protocol It struck me as exceedingly lacking in cleverness. It looked like a hodgepodge of existing web technologies mashed together instead of a real evolutionary leap. It could have been so much more.
But in the end, it may be good enough.
After all, with social media the hardest part is gaining critical mass. All of the big players, from Facebook to Twitter, none of them offered anything especially Earth shattering. They just had the population to be useful.
Anyway, to the point here, one of the axes that I grind is people being misled as to what this platform is actually offering. I just think we need to be more honest about things ranging from the lack of privacy through the lack of full decentralization.
A lot of the excitement around this platform is based on misunderstandings about what the platform actually is, and that's not good for anybody.
