Imagine a world without platform lock-in, where no ban or billionaire could take down your social network. That’s what ActivityPub has planned.
Mastondon does allow you to export your profiles and set them up on a different instance; I reckon some folks will figure out a solution on how to easily jump ship.
This is one of the biggest things I think Lemmy needs. You should be able to create a backup of your profile and export/import it into another instance. That way if something happens or you have a problem with the instance admins you can migrate with no loss or minimal loss to your account.
i’ll be honest hearing lemmy while being on kbin threw me into a loop, made me wonder if i was in a lemmy community and not a kbin magazine lmao. i gotta get used to this.
But yeah, both Lemmy and Kbin need the same flexibility of Mastodon. The more easily one can move, the less likely megacorps will see value in gobbling up instances. Long-term goal might be cross-platform profile compatibility, but right now that’s a pipe dream.
To be fair, kbin doesn’t label things very well right now. I’m using both, and Lemmy makes it far more clear where a post is coming from.
Think of it as a mailing list. There’s a bunch of people in it getting updates from others. Some use Gmail, others use outlook, others Yahoo, etc.
I think one limiting factor that has yet to be addressed is that you can move your profile, but you can’t move your content. Another is identity. How do you know which Mastodon server has an authoritative (i.e. “blue-check”) profile for a given person/entity?
edit: Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it’s possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger problem.
Mastodon has the seeds of this authority in that you can put links on your profile and then have them flagged by putting code on the website. So my Mastodon account could have a link to kazuyadarklightofficial.com and the flag proves I own/control that site. So if you know/can determine that site is THE KazuyaDarklight site, then you know you have the right Mastodon account.
I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself. You control the domain and what’s hosted. I could setup @thorned@rose.social and store my content on my server. In much the same vein as custom emails - hello@rose.social could be my email (technically I could have thorned@rose.social but that could be confusing with only a dropped @ but anyways).
Obviously this is not going to be a solution for everyone and it would be good to have a way to backup your content and be able to move it between servers. But in the mean time, it’s a workable solution for those who find it important enough to go down that route. 🤷🏻♀️
I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself.
That’s exactly what I did. Have it running in docker containers at a VPS provider for $5/month and ship backups off to Backblaze nightly.
Never have to worry about my “home” instance dying/suddenly disappearing or defederating other instances. I like to self-host when it makes sense to, and this is definitely a situation where it makes sense.
