hello. i am (involuntarily) back on this account, since my new instance, thekitty.zone got nuked by the admin without prior notice. I have no way of contacting either, they're refusing all invites on matrix and I don't know what happened. I have no way of recovering anything from there.

I used to be @schrottkatze, but I have no way of recovering any followers from there.

I am working on my own instance, but till that's up (hopefully in a few hours), I'll be back here.

 Please boost so people can find me again.

Edit: I am very thankful for everyone who boosted this! :)

I've now once again switched instances, this time to one that I host (well, it's on a VPS), now I'm at @schrottkatze :)

@obsidianical @schrottkatze this reminded me to download my current following list.

I trust my admin, but better safe than sorry.
@obsidianical @schrottkatze that's really sad to hear but I hope you get your own instance setup sooner than later...
@kkarhan @schrottkatze working on it, currently still having some problems with hetzner ARM
@obsidianical @schrottkatze sorry what happened to you. I hope you can meet your follower and followee soon!

@obsidianical @schrottkatze
There is a way to migrate your account and pull in your old followers into your new acct. Check out @mastotips for information on how to do that.

If you can't get into your old account at all, it might not be possible, but #FediTips should have help for you, if anyone can.

@AnneTheWriter1 @schrottkatze @mastotips the entire instance is *gone*. i not only can't get into it, the instance is dead.

@obsidianical Good luck, looking to see what cool domain name you got for it.

Also relay.gay is cool, just saying 😁

@obsidianical @schrottkatze I am so sorry to hear.

Perhaps Mastadon needs a way to backup each account and follower information from one server to another so if a server goes down, as with an admin shuttering it, a person can at least retain their follower list. I don’t think this even has to be real time, perhaps once a day. Build in some redundancy.

@obsidianical hey. It’s cool. Federation means a lot of things, but one of them is that you can move. May suggest hachyderm? It’s the best.

@gewalker I know, and no.

I cannot move because my previous instance, which I moved to from this one, is entirely gone. down. without warning.

I'm not going to move to hachyderm because of some incidents I hear of every now and then, which do not exactly build trust in the administration, and I'm working on hosting my own calckey anyway.

@obsidianical and that is fine. Literally the point of a federated system. I hope you find a supportive and safe home. And if anybody on hachy felt like giving you shit, I am almost always up for a bit of a ruckus.
@obsidianical I’m amplifying your response because I think we improve by feedback.

@obsidianical @schrottkatze It is situations like this that make me want an id system built into ActivityPub that lets you restore your account easily.

I am sorry to hear that that happened to you as it is a bummer.

@Zach777 @obsidianical @schrottkatze

People should look into
#Zot's #NomadicIdentity. It has been around for years and you can do what you just described and more.

1. True account portability
2. You are not locked into one instance
3. Your presence on different servers are all synchronised.

If your primary instance goes down, you can just login to another instance you sync'd earlier and continue from where you left.

Once your primary instance goes back online, it catches up and poof, you're back into using your primary instance as if nothing happened.

Or, if it goes down permanently, you can set another instance (you setup earlier) as your new primary instance. Everyone will be updated accordingly.

Your followers, your following, blocks, content, uploaded images, settings, it's all synchronised. (Of course, there will be minor differences depending on what the admin restricted, like instance bans.)

You can test it with any
#Hubzilla instance.

There is also
#Streams, a child of Hubzilla. Streams has been released in the #PublicDomain, so that means its code can be used by anyone.

The technology has been there for years. It's not about this and that lacking account portability, it's that, it is being ignored. ;)

@youronlyone @obsidianical That is really neat. I have heard of that before.

I still think ActivityPub and other federated protocols should have this functionality built in imo. Hubzilla is on my project list of things to look into for sure at this point lol.

@obsidianical @schrottkatze this is the worst about Mastodon.
@tat2dfarmlady @schrottkatze that implies that something like that can't happen on centralized corporate platforms, which it absolutely can. just that no matter if they provide a notice or not, you can't migrate there.
@obsidianical @schrottkatze Yes it may happen but, I think on corp sites they send notice. On here, for example, an instance can get entirely blocked, without you having anything to do with the reason they got blocked. All you know is that all of the sudden you’re invisible. You have to figure things out on your own a lot. Even if people help it’s hard - not a very intuitive system. I’m on 2 instances, I don’t even know how or why!
@tat2dfarmlady @schrottkatze I mean, yeah. But still, even if they do you can't simply migrate. Of course there's tradeoffs, but i prefer the fediverse anyway because I have more control either way.
@obsidianical @schrottkatze @schrottkatze it is so katzen to just wander between instances like this with attitude and where you please