jandi
MistyI try not to wade into discourse, but I feel like every time I see potentially urgent need for people to migrate instances on short notice, I wish Mastodon had true account portability with post migration. I think it’s beyond time to get it done.
Elara Voss fucked my wife@misty it's just sad at this point 😔
(🖬🖫). ₍^. .^₎⟆@misty feels like someone took the dns registrar transfer and made it for people.
saucerlost@misty
I'm enjoying being here, but there was a moment recently where I stumbled across some discourse about the main instance being too big and excited talk about just blocking it. I said I'd switch instances if it was easier. I was told it is easy, and was linked multiple times to a FediTips guide that said itself "it's kind of a pain and it might not fully work". 🤷
Anyway... I agree.
vxo
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops@misty christ who is it this time
(I'm also out of patience for This Sort Of Thing In General)
dragonfrog@ifixcoinops @misty at a guess - mstdn.ca operator is being sued for embezzlement from his time as treasurer for a community organization. No idea how meritorious or likely to succeed the suit is but the server is physically in his house and is legally his property so it could have to be sold to repay the plaintiff if they win.
Ari [APz] Sovijärvi@misty When I come across this issue personally, I had to check the project for a PR about this. Naturally it had stagnated the same way a lot of other quality of life issues had that people want but the authors don't.
Kenneth Rapp@misty One thing (maybe the only thing) I think Nostr does right (or better than ActivityPub) is giving you local control of your identity.
If I could just host a JSON file on my site and use some public keys for Mastodon, Pixelfed or whatever it would be awesome.
Mike Perham 
@misty @sstephenson why not treat it more as ephemeral chatter rather than content needing a forever home? That’s what I use a blog for.
Sam Stephenson@getajobmike @misty I’m good with ephemerality when it’s my choice! Not so much when it’s someone else’s whim or circumstances. And I think most people don’t have the necessary context when they pick an instance and create an account
PointlessOne 
@sstephenson @getajobmike @misty
I treat toots more like in-the-moment thing but I still want to preserve it. Because while it's not the most refined and evergreen it's still kinda a reflection of me.
This is kinda why I went with my own instance.
More on topic, migration is in the works for Mastodon (and ActivityPub as a protocol) but meanwhile you can use Slurp to import a Mastodon export archive.
@pointlessone I’m curious, is it actively in the works? The last few times I’ve seen this come up, the discussion had actively stalled out and there was no work towards a Mastodon implementation.
@misty I’ll be honest, I don't pay much attention to it but I saw it on the roadmap somewhere. My understanding is that it takes time because they also want to make it a w3c spec and all spec work takes a lot of time.
Ricardo Harvin@getajobmike @misty @[email protected] That seems to be a comment on "solving" an entirely different issue.
@getajobmike @sstephenson I think it’s fine if you personally prefer to use it that way, but many people don’t and I don’t think the software should be mandating it. Especially since many users generally aren’t aware they’ll lose their posts on migrating until they’ve already made many posts on their current instance!
Dawn Ahukanna@misty or proper single instance support - only using the server for authentication and post exchange similar to email send (SMTP) and receive (POP3/IMAP).
Jean-François Mezei@misty There are 2 issues. The people you follow. This is easier to migrate as you can export list from old server and upload it to new one. New one then makes all the requests to remote servers to send such and such's traffic to your instance. (Old server technically still gets those messages too).
The second partis harder. The old server needs to send authenticated "forwarding" request to everyone that follows you so they now follow you on new server.
(cont)
@misty (cont). Telling all the people who follow you to update their profile to point to your new location has security implications.
If any server were able to issue such requests, you could easily "steal" an account's followers to be moved to a fake account and that fake account would then get the DMs etc that the sender thinks will reach you but reaches the thief instead.
By requiring access to old server means you authorized the forwarding. (and your new account has been linked to old
Edwin G. 
David Penfold 
@misty And/or including some sort of backup function so if your instance suddenly disappears you can restore your account onto another instance, possibly using something clever like PKI to get your followers too on the new instance. I haven't actually thought about this before, so I'm not writing an RFP here, more a Request For Musings.
Edit: I see someone else in the replies mentioned the user owning their identity and distributing the public key across the Fediverse. That seems like a decent idea. I guess you could do it with or without post history, as I think followers and followees are the most important thing to maintain. Taking a local copy of your posting history could be problematic as you could potentially mess with it. But I guess that due to the distributed nature of the Fediverse you could potentially recover your history from other instances (and it wouldn't require separate post backup data). The risk with that though is that if you don't have followers on other instances that are trawled by your destination instance you could lose them all. You could potentially propagate an ID history (@user@instance) rather than physically copying/moving files to a new account - but one problem could be the destination instance potentially taking a big hit as it may have to pull what it can from other instances as the new source of truth for post history. This would be more reliable in an orderly move from an instance that is still running, i guess, as it could just go to the previous source of truth. You'd need signed post versions though too. Or something.
Someone tell me to stop, please...
You could also create a quota system for instances based on size (available disk space and number of users?) as a sort of sharding process where identity metadata and posting history is backed up automatically beyond just having (active?) followers on the instance. Its simplest form may be just dishing out identities based on some algorithm to multiple reliable instances but some identities are way more prolific than others and also vary over time. Anyway, I should have been asleep ages ago and I'm running out of steam on this tangent.
@misty Have you seen Holos by @apps? https://holos.social/how-it-works
Their approach is quite unique and is listening to the needs of people like you (and me!), perhaps you could give it a try.
The Sleight Doctor 🃏🍉@misty Someone on here said the issue is bandwidth: smaller instances might struggle with folks suddenly uploading several thousand posts including lots of media.
But not disagreeing with you. Most users (me included!) don't want to have to start from scratch and manually repost all their carefully-researched posts and threads. They want a preserved online history.
Others prefer to be ephemeral and even set posts to self-destruct, but they're in a pretty small minority.
@ApostateEnglishman The thing is, if instances don’t want to accept post history, they should be given the choice not to. But that shouldn’t block the choice being offered to others! I run this instance and I don’t like the suggestion I should be denied the chance to allow users to import their post history because some instances don’t want that.
@misty Very fair point!
dante
JP@jplebreton @dante I get that there are tricky technical aspects if they want to do it perfectly, but after a decade I feel like you can at *least* implement the imperfect version…
medium rare bird@misty truly the most important problem w/ masto
flere-imsaho 🇺🇦