Anil DashOkay, here's a remarkable thing about the fediverse: I was able to seamlessly move my followers to a new server, and the vast majority of them *never even noticed* that it happened. About 24 hours ago, I decided to move from mastodon[dot]cloud (because it had been bought up by sketchy new owners), and I came to @medium's new me.dm instance. At that time, I had 25,829 followers, and now less than 24 hrs later, I have 22,648 followers on this new account — without them having to do anything.
The entire migration process took me a couple of minutes (basically, you just tell your new account that you want to migrate from your old one, then tell your old account where you're going). Now, I think this may be one of the largest follower migrations in fediverse history, so there was a little bit of weirdness in some apps and the website in terms of getting a *ton* of notifications (tens of thousands of follows) but after that settled, it was smooth sailing. And invisible to followers.
Evan Prodromou@anildash what about your follows? Did it happen automatically too?
@evan no, but that's just an easy import/export of a CSV file.
Carlo Piana 😼@carlopiana @evan yes that’s correct.
Nate@anildash @carlopiana @evan ostensibly that old server could decide to be vindictive and revert your webfinger redirect (sorry if I used terms incorrectly here), right?
@innonate @carlopiana @evan oh yeah, it’s not protocol-level accountability, it’s a nicety of mastodon implementation
@anildash @carlopiana @evan anyone working on abstracting this? N00b here but I assume there’s a DNS-like proposal out there.