It feels like the more Mastodon instance shutdowns we see, the more important it gets to think about how to enable migrating posts. Migrating a user's follows/followers is good, but for a user to lose their entire post history is pretty sever.e And the longer you use a server, the more painful it gets to lose that history of everything you've ever written.
@misty So my current somewhat inflammatory take on this is that the #Fediverse is more of a Feudalism than a Federation.
Until user-account-mobility across instances, and even #Fediverse platforms I’d say, becomes better, we haven’t got a real/meaningful Federation, at least for the purposes of social media.
In real world federations, ease of individuals’ movement is fundamental. With our instance bound and especially platform bound accounts, “Feudalism” becomes more accurate.
So here's a technical point that I'm not at all sure about, but I believe the underlying protocols have features that would allow people to maintain identities separately from their instances.
At this point the applications like Mastodon and whatever else aren't really taking advantage of that separation, but I think it's actually in there.
The ActivityPub protocol stuff is pretty big and complicated so I can never remember every nook of it, but, I think I remember that separation being part of it.
@volkris @misty Interesting!
I’m naive to the details of ActivityPub, and so my opinions are potentially obnoxious and entitled!
But, even if it’s in the protocol, that all the platforms have engineered their backends with embedded accounts baked in, then there’d still need to be a major overhaul, I’d guess?
It’d be interesting to think about how one platform might set a trend by implementing what you’re alluding to.