Okay so tumblr is banning rotating cubes saying it's porn and facebook banned saying "i'm gay" saying it's sexual solicitation and Twitter always seemed like it could disappear at any moment
I feel like we need to be getting ready for Mass Migration to Mastodon, which means we need to fix anything that keeps Mastodon from being usable, and there is in fact something that keeps Mastodon from being usable, there's one specific thing, it's this:
A few people have let me know instances now have features for backing-up and importing old toots and follows— okay, if that's automatable, that's a fix for half the problem, cool! But there needs to be some idiom for pushing to your ex-followers "@mcc is now @[email protected]", and have instances know they need to either correct the follow or present a "refollow?" popup.
(And unfortunately, there probably needs to be a way of taking that back, because this is a security attack surface the size of Alaska.)
@mcc I wish it was just completely automated. Yes, there's a way to export a few things (including who WE follow) and move to another instance.
But I wish there was some kind of authorization handshake + handoff where it just automatically updates all our followers.
Just like if we ever change our username on an instance, they still follow us. I don't want followers to have to manually do anything.
@mcc so that bit re: highlighting old accounts is functional in Mastodon (peep https://mastodon.xyz/@jackyalcine).
the reverse is kinda tricky b/c you can't ensure all of those following accounts are still around. I had a little chat with @thegibson about this just now https://hackers.town/@thegibson/101190431070128309
1.26K Toots, 101 Following, 206 Followers · Software engineer by trade (and hobby); recreational cook, blogger and poet. Activist. I like tracking my life. Subscribe at https://jacky.wtf/subscribe/
@mcc see https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/8465 and the notes on setting up mutual rel=me first here https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177#issuecomment-291688638
(the rel-me support is in now, which makes this clearer)
@mcc if part of the problem here is "oops my instance suffered catastrophic existence failure", then I don't think account migration is enough? it's not like you can migrate from an instance that doesn't exist anymore.
maybe a solution that involves linking accounts on multiple instances to a single identity? all your posts go to all linked accounts, people can follow any one of them, all your connections aggregate back to one "main" identity? something like that
@mcc here's an open issue about it. https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1
imo portability of identity would be one of the *most* killer features
How can a user switch from being [email protected] to [email protected] without losing their followers? Related problem is how can they avoid breaking all the incoming links. If their followers...
@passcod that sounds hard.
backing up and restoring is hard but i feel like the solution to THAT is to just make an automated tool / standalone separate site. mastodonglacier.social
followers aren't yours such that you can redirect their attention at will. I mean, maybe functionally it's *possible* but it has a similar ethical valence as subscribing someone else to an email list.
it's a mutual albeit asymmetric relationship initiated by the follower, made in the context of a specific instance. to move that relationship to a new instance imposes a new context.
@deejoe You can automate notification of a move, and you can give people the option to automate responding to such notifications by automatically refollowing.
Mastodon apparently has the ability to mass-DM people now. One solution would just be a slightly glossier UX over that feature that acknowledges this isn't a DM, it's a system message, like a follow request.
That UX smoothing would at least be follower-facing. So often so much of this discussion puts things in terms of the person moving between instances.
Even more, the whole discussion seems borne of the centralized, siloed, unified-identity world many of us are trying to avoid, leave behind, or at least complement. A world where things are smoothed in the same way a cattle trough is smoothed--so nothing impedes the way except to hide the view of the killing floor.
@mcc maybe there could be a program developed that, after downloaded and you've fed in your account details, automatically pulls, signs, and encrypts your data at custom-set intervals for storage on your own drive.
at the same time, instances could incorporate an account import section that takes that data, authenticates the signature, and on confirmation, reconstructs the account on their instance.
@mcc I don't know if there is a way to allow network migrations to be safe without requiring some sort of authentication method that the user in question holds the keys to, instead of the original publishing server.
If any instance could trigger a migration in absence of the original instance (ala w.t situation) that would be way more dangerous.
@mcc hmm.
seems like you could provision that public key in the actor for a user. Then have an actor representing the server who posts an activity to the entire federation with the signature produced by the user's private key. Then the other servers would assume authorization when submitting Update activities for every Activity the old actor made, to reassign attribution. Would require an extension to the spec that other servers would need to support though. Hrm.
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