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Which 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

Which 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 ago
I totally agree. And it seems like Mastodon devs are starting to take the issue seriously. So perhaps there's hope.
- ColinWright 8y ago
  To 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 ago
    Thanks, 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 ago
I don't understand why these federated social networks don't use standard email addresses for identity.
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  Well 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 ago
    Why couldn't you create an email identity specifically for social networking.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Right. I probably have at least 100 email addresses. Most of them I've abandoned, however.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  It's easy from the one direction: There's nothing stopping instance hosts from also hosting email addresses that match user account names. It might even be a good idea for some instances, in keeping a trust relationship, if your Mastodon instance was also your email provider of choice. From the other direction is tougher, because you have a many-to-many relationship to try to consider. It's a variation of the problems of OG OpenID and/or Mozilla Persona (RIP to both). If I want to use example.account@gmail.com, how do you map that to a "main" instance if you can't ask gmail.com because Google doesn't currently care about WebFinger or ActivityPub? Do you use a central database somewhere? Does that defeat the goals of decentralization you were going for in the first place?
colanderman 8y ago
Hm, I had a dream last night and the wild idea that the URI application of DDDS [1] could be used to replace or augment WebFinger for the process of associating Mastodon IDs with URLs. DDDS is already used for telephone number portability for both ENUM and SIP, so it would be an appropriate use case. Of course, this (and SRV records, for that matter) would preclude pure web clients from being able to look up IDs, but that's not a problem an HTTP DNS proxy couldn't solve. [1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3404.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3404.txt

mirimir 8y ago

I totally agree. And it seems like Mastodon devs are starting to take the issue seriously. So perhaps there's hope.

ColinWright 8y ago
To 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 ago
  Thanks, 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 ago

I don't understand why these federated social networks don't use standard email addresses for identity.

ReverseCold 8y ago
Well 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 ago
  Why couldn't you create an email identity specifically for social networking.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Right. I probably have at least 100 email addresses. Most of them I've abandoned, however.
WorldMaker 8y ago
It's easy from the one direction: There's nothing stopping instance hosts from also hosting email addresses that match user account names. It might even be a good idea for some instances, in keeping a trust relationship, if your Mastodon instance was also your email provider of choice. From the other direction is tougher, because you have a many-to-many relationship to try to consider. It's a variation of the problems of OG OpenID and/or Mozilla Persona (RIP to both). If I want to use example.account@gmail.com, how do you map that to a "main" instance if you can't ask gmail.com because Google doesn't currently care about WebFinger or ActivityPub? Do you use a central database somewhere? Does that defeat the goals of decentralization you were going for in the first place?

colanderman 8y ago

Hm, I had a dream last night and the wild idea that the URI application of DDDS [1] could be used to replace or augment WebFinger for the process of associating Mastodon IDs with URLs. DDDS is already used for telephone number portability for both ENUM and SIP, so it would be an appropriate use case. Of course, this (and SRV records, for that matter) would preclude pure web clients from being able to look up IDs, but that's not a problem an HTTP DNS proxy couldn't solve. [1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3404.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3404.txt