this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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The way I see it, the benefit of federation id that it gives you the option/freedom to move to another instance later on while still being able to access all the network’s content.
I’m not sure if lemmy currently has this feature, but for example Mastodon allows a user to move their account to another instance. It’s not necessary for someone to move their account, but having the ability to is nice. A way to think about it is that it builds the ability to flee an instance into the platform itself, but doesn’t penalize the user from fleeing an instance. Unlike reddit where people are fleeing but now they lose access to all the content reddit has.
Re Mastodon: Tbh I’m not sure. I’m also a reddit refugee and have been exploring different fediverse services. I think how mastodon implements it is as a sort of “authenticated redirect”. Not to sure on how ActivityPub supports one account controlling another account on ActivityPub. Maybe could be implemented as a sort of keyring, where the most recent account on the newest instance has tokens for each of the past accounts on the old instances so that their posts can be transparently modified by the most recent account?
Or maybe this is a non-issue and people can just make new accounts on different instances.
it's somewhat… janky.
you can 'migrate' an account, to use the masto term that will make it easier to search. this:
it does not:
i'm not clear on how long your old posts linger at old-place, and you might have to export/import your following list.
it's possible, i've seen lots of people do it, but it gets more unappealing the longer you've been actively using the account. unless you're like me and have posts set to self-destruct within days. and you can imagine the difficulty of actually moving the posts - if i were an avid shitposter and i moved house to noshit·social, then all my garbage would be dumped in the yard in violation of policy.