It's complicated as other servers will be referring to your server by its current domain name. I cannot find a procedure in the official documentation?
One workaround might be to create a new server and migrate your accounts from the existing server to the new server?
To keep this in perspective, it's unlikely to affect you in the short term, but if you're creating a new server in the future this is something to bear in mind.
@ixo as @homegrown already wrote, because user&instance refferences are all linked to the domain it is apparently extremely difficult to switch. maybe @insert knows more as they wrote "change my servers domain again"?
@glowl@ixo@homegrown Yes they are linked but, I just spin up two docker containers one pointing to the new domain one pointing to the old, preform a user migration than shutdown the old instance, it worked for @insert -> my current account. You do loose your old posts in the process but really a negligible loss depending on how you look at it.
@homegrown I understand that, but at the same time it seems so paradoxical. Mastodon is such an enclave of freedom on the internet and then some legal tug of war over the use of the name starts? It would be very sad, and probably a lot of people would then switch to the fork project. The name "ActivityPub" probably doesn't belong to anyone yet.
@michal@homegrown
Makes perfect sense to me that he'd want to retain some rights since his name is on the tin 🤷
Even famously concensus-driven places like wikipedia just cannot exist without a 'high court' that has final say in what gets published and who gets banned
It makes sense from his point of view legally, but at an emotional level it conflicts with the open decentralised ethos of the Fediverse, where no one owns the network.
This is just a guess, but I don't think most people realise that the work "mastodon" is a trademark owned by a central legal entity?
The good news is you can avoid all this by choosing a domain name that doesn't mention that word.
@homegrown@Cleopatra@michal it’s no different than what Mozilla does. Make significant changes to Firefox, and you can’t call it Firefox any more. Is that less free? Yes. But it also means a stranger can’t ruin the reputation.
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