I migrated servers last week and boy did I develop some strong opinions about migration and the as-yet only semi-fulfilled promise of account portability.
If you're thinking about moving instances—or you'd like to know yet more about my dreams for better networks—here's a post you might want to read:
@kissane Great article. 🎉 Still a fan of the fediverse and activitypub, but I have felt duped by the promise of simple and full portability as well.
I do see some new ideas and processes for it being considered and built, but not from Mastodon directly that I know of? And nothing that a non-technical social media person would ever WANT to figure out.
@box464 @kissane Fediverse account portability between domains works a lot better than any other comparable protocol -- email, Web sites, XMPP.
We don't even have to get into working with walled garden social networks.
That's not the standard we should hold ourselves to. It can get a lot better, and it will, but let's give a little credit to the fact that it works at all.
Technical achievements aside, and at the risk of making devs feel bad about their great work, this stuff comes down to unmet expectations and broken promises. So much of the difficulties of federation are glossed over to the point that the image is that it’s all positives. Negative surprises are unappealing user experiences, especially amidst such an air of positivity.
Maybe we need to readjust our needs re social media. But that’s not and unlikely to be the pitch.
Yeah, I feels like someone else I going to have to figure it out, be it a fork of mastodon or a completely different Activitypub network and mastodon starts losing users to it.
At least ganking and modifying foss code for your own foss thing is fine at the philosophical level. Though it probably hurts feelings, especially depending on how credit is metted out.
Erin Kissane
Jeff
Evan Prodromou
maegul
Dawn Tåke 🌙 