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With e-mail there is a way to migrate without losing your identity, if you own your own domain, and point its MX records at your provider (who is a real e-mail
by colanderman 8y ago
With e-mail there is a way to migrate without losing your identity, if you own your own domain, and point its MX records at your provider (who is a real e-mail provider and not a "free" walled garden like GMail or AOL). Unfortunately owning a domain is not as accessible for 95% of the population as it ought to be.
This concept of digital identity mobility is important to ensure that one's digital life is not tied to a single service provider. XMPP provides this capability as well, through SRV records. Bizarrely, given its aim to free users from walled gardens, Mastodon does not support SRV records [1]. The developers give some excuses about the WebFinger protocol, which basically means that if I want to own my own Mastodon identity, I must run my own server (either Mastodon or a WebFinger redirect).
Apparently Diaspora made the same shortsighted decision [2]. I'm surprised and saddened that the concept of identity mobility is seemingly not well understood by those developing decentralized social platforms.
[1] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1931 https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1931
[2] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1109 https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/issues/1109
- mirimir 8y agoYes, I know that. But email was just the analogy ;) For Mastodon, that would be running your own instance, I guess.
- colanderman 8y agoWhich is unfortunate. I consider myself a highly skilled technical user, and the burden of running and maintaining my own Mastodon server, or even my own Nginx server to redirect WebFinger requests somewhere else, exceeds the free time I have to devote to the problem. (Keeping another VM alive, updated, and configured through the years costs mental energy, time, and money.) Whereas, adding an SRV record to my existing DNS server? That's trivial, comes at no marginal cost to me, and doesn't leave me with the constant mental burden of worrying whether my Mastodon or WebFinger server is available, secure, etc. Owning my own digital identity should be easy. Simplicity encourages adoption, and widespread self-ownership of one's digital identity is key to hindering the growth of walled gardens. Mastodon does not make ownership of one's digital identity simple.
- mirimir 8y agoI totally agree. And it seems like Mastodon devs are starting to take the issue seriously. So perhaps there's hope.
- ColinWright 8y agoTo the best of my knowledge they have always taken account migration seriously. But it's a hard problem, and there are many, many issues to be sorted. As a result it has been and is being discussed in detail in the background while other features have been implemented and rolled out. Some of those other issues were contentious exactly because there was insufficient prior discussion, so the question of account migration is taking its time. As I say, it's hard, so it won't be happening in the immediate future. But it is happening.
- mirimir 8y agoThanks, that's good to know. I interpreted some comments on that ticket as dismissing account migration as almost frivolous. But maybe that's because it's an old and difficult challenge, and I didn't have the context to understand the comments.
- colordrops 8y agoI don't understand why these federated social networks don't use standard email addresses for identity.
- ReverseCold 8y agoWell first and foremost, people usually don't want their email published everywhere. Especially in this decentralized context, that'd be a gold mine for spammers.
- colordrops 8y agoWhy couldn't you create an email identity specifically for social networking.