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If a instance I sold, you can just move to another instance while you don’t lose contact to alle the people you follow. There is even a feature which enables y

• mattdesl 4y ago
  But, 1) your past media and posts are not migrated to the new instance, so your timeline effectively has to 'start over', and 2) from what I understand the move is not seamless; you must announce your account has moved, and hope that your follow-base is proactive enough to re-follow you on the new account. Since the architecture doesn't prevent take-overs, and requires instances to be continually maintained and upheld by their owners, you might have to do this several times over the years (take-overs, instances shutting down), leaving behind a trail of dead accounts. I presume most users will just end up sticking to a single major instance due to network effects and the desire to avoid these migrations. More concerning is that all of the private data (including direct messages) on the old instance is now in the hands of its new owner, who may have a different idea of what to do with it.