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:
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
deejoe