sponge (Mike Rubits)May 23

if mastodon is about user freedom, then why am i trapped?

i've been running a server on my domain since 2018, and i'm tired of keeping up with the updates. i'd love to try a simpler piece of server software to make maintenance easier, so i took a look at gotosocial, and at the top of their guide is this:

"It's not supported across the Fediverse to switch between implementations on the same domain"

...excuse me? so now this domain is permanently tainted?

so what are my options?

- transfer my account to some other site. be part of all the drama and defederating and dealing with mastodon HOAs. lose my fun domain account domain name. don't bring along any of my data/pictures/posts, which frankly is the thing i care about more than my followers/following. i can download my data but who gives a shit i can do that on twitter.

- keep running tootsuite until the end of time, and having to computer janitor it to not get my shit hacked. i don't even want to host a web ui, i only use external clients, so i'm spending god knows how much resources on my vps just to run this stack i'm not using.

- buy/use a different domain, setup a new server there, hope i picked a good one that i won't regret using! transfer my following/followers, and lose all my post history

- delete everything and stop using this piece of shit thing.

the people who came up with this design are fucking stupid. not only is my data trapped inside tootsuite in any meaningful way, but my domain is also now permanently locked to this install.

Show threadA Part of BeeJul 14

@sponge from what I can tell transferring the posts in and out of different bits of server software isn't very portable, I've heard rumours of a few people doing it in hacky ways but yeah. the standard is the user/server protocol not the storage stuff.

If the main issue is finding the updates a PITA you could contact a few mastodon hosting providers and see if any of them offer importing content then you could pay them to janitor the updates as it were?

Show threadNatasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸Jul 14

@morix @sponge It's indeed a shortcoming of the ActivityPub protocol, nothing the services can do anything about. The only way to "move" your posts would be to recreate them all, which is the equivalent of a DDoS for other instances. The W3C didn't think this far ahead when first creating this spec. 😐

People do work on a newer protocol revision that eventually supports it though! However that will take years to come…

Show threadA Part of Bee

@Natanox @sponge I've seen a couple of people who bodged in methods of recreating but not propagating old posts from memory but its been years since I've heard of it talked about.

So its theoretically possible I guess, just kinda scary being as you'd also bust all the old URL references and several other things.

Jul 14 at 6:27pmWeb
Show threadNatasha Nox 🇺🇦🇵🇸Jul 14

@morix @sponge That'd bust both the old URLs as well as make all those posts inivisible on any instance but yours. 🫤

It really is an issue that requires fixing, unfortunately doing so properly takes time. Even more so since AP 2.0 (or "AP Extended" aa some apparently called the efforts) has to stay backwards-compatible, a monumental task.