mccDec 5, 2018

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:

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

Support account migration · Issue #177 · tootsuite/mastodon

A lot of people seem to be jumping on https://mastodon.social right now, even though the end goal is to have users separated out across multiple federated instances. However, if people start puttin...

Show threadmccDec 5, 2018
The lack of an account migration idiom on Mastodon really is fatal, it is sincerely a thing that keeps me from recommending Mastodon to people. The http://witches.town evaporation to me was kind of like a disproof of the fediverse and I feel like maybe the fediverse dev community should have treated it as such. There needs to be a way to recover your account, "toots", and follower network if one instance goes away.

Show threadmccDec 5, 2018
If an instance goes away, or you decide you like another instance's UX/features more— well, you can repost stuff, you can shrug off content that's lost, you can let your friends know, ~oh, did you hear? I'm on fuckspace.industries now~. You can do these things *IF* Mastodon is a fun little side thing where we do our low-pressure social networking. This is not feasible or adequate if Mastodon is actually meant to be a *replacement* for Twitter.
Show threadmccDec 5, 2018

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.)

Show threadlavenderDec 5, 2018
@mcc there is an automated way to send a DM to all of your followers letting them know to follow your new account, and there's a way to mark accounts as redirecting to a new one. it's still not a complete solution but we're a lot closer to there than we were last time you checked, i think
Show threadmccDec 5, 2018
@lavender that's pretty cool, it would be nice if the instances could automatically interpret the DM and do [[something]] with it.
Show threadlavender
@mcc there's not really anything stopping instances from doing that, but i wouldn't actually want to be automatically signed up to follow someone without manual intervention
Dec 5, 2018 at 9:31pmWeb
Show threadmccDec 5, 2018
@lavender sure, but it doesn't seem hard to make that a feature you can turn on and off?