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Yes, you're right that email is more flexible here, however the issue is that lets say you have your own domain name, but use fastmail. If you loose your fastma
by AsyncAwait 7y ago
Yes, you're right that email is more flexible here, however the issue is that lets say you have your own domain name, but use fastmail. If you loose your fastmail for whatever reason and didn't have backups, you get to keep your email identity if you point your MX to a new provider, which means people can still contact you, but you won't have any of your old email.
ActivityPub servers could do something similar here and in fact Mastodon in a sense supports this, (as you point out, the Actor's identity is essentially the URL of their profile, which could change host), but the problem then becomes that old interactions with the user will have 'ghost replies'. Understandably, as far as I know to save on storage and improve response times, not every interaction a user has on the fediverse with different users is copied to his/her server, that is replies in a thread from different users on different servers are still stored on their servers. Therefore if someone in a thread deletes their server, their responses/interactions will essentially disappear to anyone viewing that thread, so I might be replying to something a user said, but you won't be able to see what I am replying to etc.
Mastodon supports import/export, so that an Actor/user should be able to move servers and as long as they import their toots+followers + use the same domain, you shouldn't notice a difference, but I don't believe this is supported by the protocol directly.