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The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the fediverse right now. I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positi

by AJ007 3y ago

The account portability is probably the biggest problem with the fediverse right now. I finally signed up for Mastodon despite reading little to nothing positive about it on hn. It was easy to use, and the signal to noise ratio was vastly improved from my Twitter experience. However, that lack of account portability means users can, have, and will continue to get cut off. Servers cost thousands of USD per months with no revenue and domain name ownership can magically vanish for many reasons. With no business model for server operators, these are significant issues. That confusion for users may even be the primary force that drives them over to something like Facebook's Threads. There are analogies to e-mail here for the server operator. If I said any numbers I would be making them up, but I'm assuming 1 Mastodon user costs a lot more, both in compute/bandwidth and support, than 1 e-mail user. Free servers are not going to scale. Account portability doesn't solve this, but it means if something happens to one server operator, that user doesn't churn in to the ether and never return. I've been keeping an eye on https://fedidb.org/ https://fedidb.org/ (not my site.) While total users and servers keep going up over the past year, active users keep dropping. It could be something related to how they record usage, but it isn't a promising thing. I'm less skeptical about long term adaptation. Most of the negative sentiment I've read on hn about Mastodon just was wrong. Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft are all fully accelerating in to ad business models which will make much of their products less unappealing by the day. If history is any lesson, when a new competitor shows up without ads and a similar or better experience, the incumbent is in trouble.

treyd 3y ago
You can migrate your account between instances and take your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit registrations when activity starts to be a financial burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means that instances can stay sustainable.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > You can migrate your account between instances and take tour followers and follows with you. You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers. > Server shutdowns are rare Not rare enough though.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > You can if the server is operational. And if Bluesky's servers stop being operational? Where is your data hosted?
    - pierat 3y ago
      Its not even that. Look at Shitter and Reddit: they just turned off API access and introduced heavy rate limits to webpage loads. Good luck scraping your account details with that. Enshittification is a thing with ALL commercial services. And eventually BlueSky will have their "The sky is falling! Crank the money extraction lever." And I'd move that timeframe up a LOT if they took VC money. Feces, err, uhmm VCs want their hockeystick growth to be a hockeystick. They want their 30x , 50x, or 100x.
    - AgentME 3y ago
      If you or someone else has an archive of your data, then you can seamlessly port your account somewhere else. With Mastodon, I'm not sure there's an established flow for downloading your full account data, and you have to have your old server cooperate and redirect your user page to your page on your new server.
      - treyd 3y ago
        Yes there is an established flow for exporting your full account data. It comes as an easy export zip and CSVs.
  - treyd 3y ago
    The handful of moderately large instances that have shut down rhat I'm aware of gave long notices, in a couple of cases over a year, before actually going offline. The only notable counterexample I remember was BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other examples I would like to know about them.
    - 3y ago
vidarh 3y ago
That, to me, is an argument for improving the existing account portability of ActivityPub, not for starting from scratch. To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me want to stay far away. People will bridge it to ActivityPub anyway.
rglullis 3y ago
Nostr solves the account portability, albeit poorly. (Your identity is your public key, so if the key gets compromised your identity is as well) I am more excited about Takahe, which decouples the servers running the federation from the domains holding the actor ids. This means that a hosting provider like mine won't need to allocate one whole instance for each user that wants to have their own domain. There is also a FEP from the developer of Mitra which aims to flip the ownership of the account keys, which would prevent cases of servers going under and stopping users from recovering their identity.

by AJ007 3y ago

treyd 3y ago

You can migrate your account between instances and take your followers and follows with you. Server shutdowns are rare, since administrators tend to proactively limit registrations when activity starts to be a financial burden. Avoiding the growth-at-all-costs mindset means that instances can stay sustainable.

lapcat 3y ago
> You can migrate your account between instances and take tour followers and follows with you. You can if the server is operational. If the server not operational and cooperative, you can't. And you can't migrate your posts, only your followers. > Server shutdowns are rare Not rare enough though.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > You can if the server is operational. And if Bluesky's servers stop being operational? Where is your data hosted?
  - pierat 3y ago
    Its not even that. Look at Shitter and Reddit: they just turned off API access and introduced heavy rate limits to webpage loads. Good luck scraping your account details with that. Enshittification is a thing with ALL commercial services. And eventually BlueSky will have their "The sky is falling! Crank the money extraction lever." And I'd move that timeframe up a LOT if they took VC money. Feces, err, uhmm VCs want their hockeystick growth to be a hockeystick. They want their 30x , 50x, or 100x.
  - AgentME 3y ago
    If you or someone else has an archive of your data, then you can seamlessly port your account somewhere else. With Mastodon, I'm not sure there's an established flow for downloading your full account data, and you have to have your old server cooperate and redirect your user page to your page on your new server.
    - treyd 3y ago
      Yes there is an established flow for exporting your full account data. It comes as an easy export zip and CSVs.
- treyd 3y ago
  The handful of moderately large instances that have shut down rhat I'm aware of gave long notices, in a couple of cases over a year, before actually going offline. The only notable counterexample I remember was BitcoinHackers.org shutting down suddenly with a note saying "haha look at how easy it is for mastodon instances to shut down go use nostr", making it a self-fulfilling prophecy in that case. If you have other examples I would like to know about them.
  - 3y ago

vidarh 3y ago

That, to me, is an argument for improving the existing account portability of ActivityPub, not for starting from scratch. To me, the Not Inventented Here feel to Bluesky makes me want to stay far away. People will bridge it to ActivityPub anyway.

rglullis 3y ago

Nostr solves the account portability, albeit poorly. (Your identity is your public key, so if the key gets compromised your identity is as well) I am more excited about Takahe, which decouples the servers running the federation from the domains holding the actor ids. This means that a hosting provider like mine won't need to allocate one whole instance for each user that wants to have their own domain. There is also a FEP from the developer of Mitra which aims to flip the ownership of the account keys, which would prevent cases of servers going under and stopping users from recovering their identity.