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>Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don't like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you're always free to p

>Finally, with instances, you keep control: if you find that you don't like the moderation policies or culture of a particular instance, you're always free to pick up and move to a different one. Last I heard, Mastodon didn't support migration between instances while still keeping followers, etc. Instead, you have to essentially start from scratch with a new account on a new instance. This is a serious problem because it strongly discourages exodus; Twitter itself shows that people will put up with a lot of nonsense before leaving to alternatives because they've cultivated a brand and a following and don't want to lose it all. Moderators of instances are not a static thing; like any political system it shifts with whoever is in charge over time. An instance that seemed friendly to a user initially can over time become more oppressive to them, but the user has invested so much into that instance that they would have to leave behind that they'd put up with it when they shouldn't have to.

ColinWright 8y ago
You can export the lists of people you follow, block, or mute, and then import them into your new account at your new instance. With regards people that follow you, you can mark an account as migrated and leave a forwarding address. People are starting to do this, and it seems to be working reasonably well, although it's obviously not ideal. This is a difficult problem to solve and people are actively working on it. If you have a suggestion as to how one could create and sustain a presence on one instance, gain a body of followers, and then migrate all that to another instance, then I'm sure people would be interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
- eat_veggies 8y ago
  Would it be interesting to have sort of a signed "302 moved permanently" message that signals to other clients to automatically follow the other account?
  - amelius 8y ago
    But what if the original instance shuts down, or becomes malicious and doesn't cooperate?
    - ColinWright 8y ago
      In any kind of distributed system there are failure modes you can't protect against, the best you can do is create a mechanism that will work in most cases and go with that. When you leave you can export the people you follow, and it's likely that without too much trouble you can get the list of people who follow you. I've just done so, and it didn't seem to hard. There isn't really a simple interface for it - I just listed them and saved the HTML, then extracted them from that. Having got your list of followers you can then ping them to let them know you've moved, and I suspect someone somewhere is working on a way of doing that semi-automatically.
yoz-y 8y ago
It also discourages from joining smaller instances in the fear that they might go away.
ChristianBundy 8y ago
Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network. I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features: - your account is just your public key - your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed - when you follow people you replicate their profile on your device - messages are transmitted with an eventually consistent gossip network, which is fast and resilient - you can assign nicknames to yourself and others, and since there isn't a central naming authority (if you have two friends named Matt, you get to disambiguate however you would in real life) - all data is downloaded locally, so you can view all the same content whether you're online or off-grid - you can reply while offline and your messages will sync when you peer again (again, think gossip networks) - there are tons of different clients and implementations and applications running on the network - Twitter-like posts - IRC-like chat - blogging - Signal-like private messages - image search - chess (!) - secret sharding among friends (!!) - mutual credit - by far the best community I've ever been a part of Anyway, if you want to love Mastodon you might look into Scuttlebutt. [0]: https://social.coop https://social.coop [1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz https://scuttlebutt.nz EDIT: having trouble formatting the list, did I mention that Scuttlebutt supports full Markdown?
- lazyjones 8y ago
  Sounds very nice, but Scuttlebutt seems to be for desktop computers/servers only. I can‘t use it on an iPad or on the smartphone...
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    This is delightful. Scuttlebutt appears to be very much the sort of approach that I was talking about in another thread about 90s app-centric approach. And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The irony being that the unsupported platforms are arguably the last bastions of “I expect a native app.” All told, I think I’m coming around to the idea that this problem is better than the problems of walled services. This one is fundamentally technological, while the Facebook / Twitter service problem is corrosive to individual privacy and society.

ColinWright 8y ago

You can export the lists of people you follow, block, or mute, and then import them into your new account at your new instance. With regards people that follow you, you can mark an account as migrated and leave a forwarding address. People are starting to do this, and it seems to be working reasonably well, although it's obviously not ideal. This is a difficult problem to solve and people are actively working on it. If you have a suggestion as to how one could create and sustain a presence on one instance, gain a body of followers, and then migrate all that to another instance, then I'm sure people would be interested to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

eat_veggies 8y ago
Would it be interesting to have sort of a signed "302 moved permanently" message that signals to other clients to automatically follow the other account?
- amelius 8y ago
  But what if the original instance shuts down, or becomes malicious and doesn't cooperate?
  - ColinWright 8y ago
    In any kind of distributed system there are failure modes you can't protect against, the best you can do is create a mechanism that will work in most cases and go with that. When you leave you can export the people you follow, and it's likely that without too much trouble you can get the list of people who follow you. I've just done so, and it didn't seem to hard. There isn't really a simple interface for it - I just listed them and saved the HTML, then extracted them from that. Having got your list of followers you can then ping them to let them know you've moved, and I suspect someone somewhere is working on a way of doing that semi-automatically.

yoz-y 8y ago

It also discourages from joining smaller instances in the fear that they might go away.

ChristianBundy 8y ago

Yeah, I spent a few weeks (months?) on Mastodon, and even though I was on a cooperatively owned and operated instance[0] it just wasn't a substitute for a fully p2p social network. I found another network called Scuttlebutt[1] that I've been using almost daily. It has a few neat features: - your account is just your public key - your profile is an append-only feed of JSON messages, each cryptographically signed - when you follow people you replicate their profile on your device - messages are transmitted with an eventually consistent gossip network, which is fast and resilient - you can assign nicknames to yourself and others, and since there isn't a central naming authority (if you have two friends named Matt, you get to disambiguate however you would in real life) - all data is downloaded locally, so you can view all the same content whether you're online or off-grid - you can reply while offline and your messages will sync when you peer again (again, think gossip networks) - there are tons of different clients and implementations and applications running on the network - Twitter-like posts - IRC-like chat - blogging - Signal-like private messages - image search - chess (!) - secret sharding among friends (!!) - mutual credit - by far the best community I've ever been a part of Anyway, if you want to love Mastodon you might look into Scuttlebutt. [0]: https://social.coop https://social.coop [1]: https://scuttlebutt.nz https://scuttlebutt.nz EDIT: having trouble formatting the list, did I mention that Scuttlebutt supports full Markdown?

lazyjones 8y ago
Sounds very nice, but Scuttlebutt seems to be for desktop computers/servers only. I can‘t use it on an iPad or on the smartphone...
- peatmoss 8y ago
  This is delightful. Scuttlebutt appears to be very much the sort of approach that I was talking about in another thread about 90s app-centric approach. And here we see the downside of that approach: “it doesn’t support my platform.” The irony being that the unsupported platforms are arguably the last bastions of “I expect a native app.” All told, I think I’m coming around to the idea that this problem is better than the problems of walled services. This one is fundamentally technological, while the Facebook / Twitter service problem is corrosive to individual privacy and society.