Re: Issue triage today

Say what you will about a per-account key system (such as prototyped in 
FEP-521a), it would certainly enable some elegant solutions to this 
problem, such as allowing users to export a key or delegate authority to 
some kind of external authenticator, which could be used in an unknown 
future to trigger an custodial export when a server spins down and dumps 
all its data in a massgrave (with fancy authorization for recovery).  
The simpler you make it for accountholders to prove "rightful" control 
of a backup, the easier it is for backups to execute migrations on 
behalf of servers that went down, right?

In any case, definitely support documenting mastodon's status quo, 
because a LOT of financially fragile servers are running it, and their 
moderation costs and compliance costs might go through the roof in the 
coming months, so it seems an urgent community service beyond more 
long-term plans for cool solutions to the underlying problem.

On 7/13/2023 12:41 AM, Evan Prodromou wrote:
> Yes, great idea.
>
> I think the current plan is to document the behaviour of Mastodon in 
> this area, as step one, with a Note or FEP.
>
> We'd probably need to then discuss problems with the Mastodon 
> technique, namely:
>
> 1. If the origin server goes offline, there's no way to move the account.
> 2. Similarly if the account is defederated.
> 3. All activities and content stay at the origin server, which keeps 
> their URLs active, but doesn't help if the server goes down.
>
> The topology of the fediverse is such that most users have gratis 
> accounts on small, unstable, volunteer-run servers, 
> donation-supported. That has made this migration process very important.
>
> I'm personally a fan of using a domain as your identity, and moving 
> from service provider to service provider as needed, transparent to 
> your social connections. But that's not the fediverse we've got right now.

Received on Friday, 14 July 2023 16:07:08 UTC