I'm the one who wrote this piece in April outlining Mastodon/GNU Social's core problem with identity portability[1]. I'm sad to see the development team has decided to focus on emojis and fancy features while kicking the society-breaking problem of federated moderation down the road. As one user put it on the open Github issue describing the problem[2]:
> Being told right up front that you should irrevocably attach your social life to a server run by some rando.... is not a welcoming way to start using a new service.
I still think Mastodon is best-in-class in terms of UI for open social projects, and hope the development team will consider tackling this problem. Until then, I still cannot endorse using Mastodon/GNU Social as a platform in its current state.
This problem is easily fixable code-wise, but there's hesitation to diverge from the standards upon which Mastodon is based, and the original standards body behind this particular issue has long since disbanded. Other than monkeypatching Mastodon (and potentially breaking GNU social federation), the solution would be to re-convene a working standards body to implement a "correct" spec for this problem. Since nobody seems willing to do that, monkeypatching Mastodon to make an order of magnitude more users comfortable with switching to it is probably my recommendation.
The world needs more protocol standards bodies and more engaged, engineering-minded parliamentarians.
It looks like the Social CG is still active, and they're working on the new ActivityPub protocol which Mastodon 2.0 supports. Follower migration is one of the issues they're discussing:
So how would this work in practice? I'm s73ver_@foo. What happens if instance foo becomes unworkable, and I need to leave (it gets overrun by spam or something). I want to move to instance bar. But, there's already a s73ver_@bar. What happens?
You can't move to s73ver_@bar, but you should be able to move to s73ver_@anywhere-else. Very easy to implement; just signal the new address you'd like to forward to, and the client picks this message up and automatically "follows" you at the new location. Many other ways have been discussed in the Github issue as well.
> Being told right up front that you should irrevocably attach your social life to a server run by some rando.... is not a welcoming way to start using a new service.
I still think Mastodon is best-in-class in terms of UI for open social projects, and hope the development team will consider tackling this problem. Until then, I still cannot endorse using Mastodon/GNU Social as a platform in its current state.
[1] https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e... [2] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177