[mRg]The ‘not being able to migrate identity’ thing on Mastodon is a big negative. I love the decentralised instance thing but if i want to start my own single-user instance with a nice domain or change to another server I have to effectively start again or tell all my followers about my move.
How it stands currently is that, even though its a decentralised design, it encourages people to cluster on one or two servers (like mastodon.social) which, for me, negates the freedom of it.
There are two factors: 1) being able to ‘redirect’ people to your new address ie 301 I’m over on another instance now - all messages get pushed/re-addressed to the new one
2) migrating all your toots / faves etc to the new instance
2) migrating all your toots / faves etc to the new instance
I think 1) is way more important than 2 and should be seen as 2 different streams of work. From what i can tell everyone is trying to solve this whole thing all in one go.
AOL Keyword: phone weasel🌹@emargee yeah i'm not a dev on the project but it seems like it'd be cool if on both instances, you could input on each one that you're forwarding from here to there, and each person's instance should update their follow info when this information is either looked up or included in the toot stream somehow. there's got to be a slick way to do it
@dimspark yup, i think the fear would be that the overhead of a ‘toot’ would increase with the lookup each time but there must be a nice way to do it
Cedric Chin@emargee @dimspark There's also the security aspect of it — e.g. how do I know [email protected] and [email protected] are the same bob. But that's definitely solvable e.g. using https://keybase.io/
I think you're right, it's possible to build this on top of the Federation protocol. But it's going to be a hack for sure; ActivityPub doesn't have a good way of detecting identity.
@cedricchin @emargee yeah, i'm in favor of keybase integration for verification (not the same as twitter but still cool) and then also on the old account side you could do something to indicate that you are forwarding to the new ID@instance.
@cedricchin @emargee it bears repeating i'm a total newb to mastodon and its architecture and i don't even know Ruby so maybe this is a much harder problem than i realized
@dimspark @cedricchin yes same here, been a long time since i coded Ruby and i have no clue of the actual architecture :) I’m sure some wild “solutionising” cant hurt :P