I'm Somewhat Disagree. I will do a blog post about it. I think theoretically this should be true but we really haven't oriented the platforms to support it.
@evan Yeah, I feel like with the state of the art right now this also requires you to operate a server (or find someone, perhaps paid hosting) to operate one for you.
I get the impression that servers could be developed / adjusted to support a model where you only need to delegate/redirect to them which would make this sort of thing much more accessible.
I further feel that being able to own/control a durable identity that could survive server migration would be a very nice feature to have.
@evan this keeps popping up and the recurring problem with Mastodon (and similar) is that identity and content hosting are intertwined.
And there are really two sides to the problem.
On the one hand, separating out identity requires you to either be technically knowledgeable and buy your own domain, or trust, yet another service to be your identity provider.
On the other hand, many forget that content hosting is a shared responsibility. Toots are not just your content, they are shared.
@gatesvp@evan if you set up your own single-user server on its own domain, with its own URLs, and its own feed, that's fine (that's how I post) but it means you're not posting as a member of some specific community along with other people.
So I can't think of running my own domain as in any way equivalent to account portability, though the systems already in place for moving accounts interact as well with that as with shared hosting systems.
This is really the meat of the question and why it's interesting. "Account Portability" isn't really defined. It means different things to different people.
To Group A, it means "I can change my username and server and bring my follows and followers with me"
To Group B, it means "I can migrate my identity, my metadata and my content anywhere I want, at will".
Group A people are fine today. Group B people, will be unhappy with every system. There are lots in between.
@evan Disagree. You cannot guarantee your control over a domain name. And sometimes people lose domains over trivial mistakes, too. Also, they cost money to rent and names are finite.
The only thing that can guarantee true account portability is a user-generated cryptographic key, which is under the control of the person creating it. This could be attached to any current domain your account is on (quite literally your current home address), and then be used to prove identity when migrating.
I appreciate the extra level of autonomy that comes with crypto keys, but they also come with a high cost of maintenance and not a lot of fault tolerance.
Domain names are very safe for most people, and we depend on them for a lot of how the Internet works.
@evan You were the one claiming that a normal person can have "control of a domain name". That's just factually false, unless you're both a registrar and immune to the government in your jurisdiction. You also didn't address the permanent (potentially life-long) rental situation and costs. Or the billions of unique domain names we'd need if your version of portability isn't supposed to be the privilege of a few.
Key backups aren't rocket science. Not a very strong sole argument IMO.
@evan I have control of multiple domain names and none of them have anything to do with the fediverse. Because I have a Mastodon account I have partial account mobility. There are other tools I can use to transfer my posts but these tools aren’t built in to Mastodon. Of course I could add a Mastodon instance to one of my domains but I don’t know what that has to do with the question in the poll.
@evan Not really. Without a "this poll has closed" notification, the results can just get lost in the stream. There's no way to tell the system you want the "closed" notification without voting, and I won't vote a guess because that would bias the results.
@alan@evan
Calckey users are starting to look like a cult with all the promotion, but.... We have a "view result" and it's great. So it's certainly possible to do on other fediverse softwares.
@evan I said “strongly agree” because having a domain you control means you’re part of the original “fediverse” and can use all the federated protocols - HTTP, SMTP, ActivityPub, etc. You can choose where your data lives (and where it doesn’t).
@evan I'm sorry, this appeared in my feed and I don't understand. Are you asking whether we'd LIKE the statement to be true (we agree with it) or we BELIEVE the statement to be true?
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