@paulschoe @sarajw absolutely.

I meant, an architecture that made nomadic identity easy, at the cost of making everyday delivery hard or slow, would not be a good architecture. It's dragging down the frequent tasks in order to optimize a very infrequent task.

I think content addressing would be an example of this kind of architecture.

Comparing the incidental moves to another instance, with the millions of toots posted every day. The moves should indeed not drag down the posts.

But a distributed environment requires the ability to move. There are too many instances whose continuity isn't guaranteed for a long period.

If we believe in a situation where people can choose a preferred instance, then we have to ensure that they don't lose everything when that instance is discontinued.

@evan @sarajw @atomicpoet @fediversenews

@paulschoe
Can there be a stopgap of downloading your content then uploading the package to an account on a new instance? If migrating it all online is such a traffic challenge?

I guess there'd have to be some proof that you are indeed the owner of that content package...

Edit to add: WhatsApp backs up your message archive on Google drive for transferring between phones.

I realise there's still traffic with the down/upload but maybe it's an option 🤷

@sarajw I should point out that it’s never occurred to me that I should want to take my posts with me – they’re not that important, nobody’s posts are in any way that important, if anyone posts something I like and I bookmark, it’s not that important, if I post anything at all, it’s not that important, and if you’re reading this, your posts are not that important

Especially in situations where a group of us are live-posting along with something we’re watching on telly (which happens every Friday evening with Top of the Pops on BBC4 here in the UK) – loads of posts which only make sense to others also sharing the same primitive hashtag mechanism and frantically updating constantly, posts which are just responses to what we’re seeing on the telly, posts that cannot possibly be contextualised if you’re not in with us, and posts that mean nothing the next day – I don’t care about posts like that, I don’t want to take them with me anywhere, if there were a way of setting their lifetime to 1 week, I’d do it (a way that is a] apparent to me without having to look for it, b] doesn’t just apply itself to every post I make, and d] can be applied to only those posts I’m making while watching telly along with other people also watching the same thing that evening)

Which sometimes makes me wonder if we should be using some form of fediverse chat room? Maybe we should

In which case, sure, yes, let’s do that – but! I will not want to sign up a new account just for that, nobody would find me, I’d not find anyone else I’m used to, what I do want to do is use my existing fediverse login to login to that hypothetical chat room as well as be logged in to the mastodon instance I’m using – both the same login, both the same identity, different usage

That’s one thing I’d use a movable identity for – being on a microblobbying service like mastodon or clakckey, and also simultaneously and at the same time, being on a chat service like something that doesn’t exist yet, but as the same person, same ID, same way of getting to me (ie, like as if I’d used my email address as the ID to all of this) (and in a world that you could trust that nobody would spam my email address just because I make it available out in the open) (which probably isn’t this world)

Why is an admin behaving as a normal user uncomfortable? I genuinely don't get it.

@u0421793 @sarajw
I always felt knowing your admins was like getting to know your local police officers. (Without the guns and tear spary)

@luca @sarajw Updated previous with the correct link.

@MetalSamurai @luca @sarajw Thank you, I finally understood it even if I’m not a tech expert! I was thinking about something like a placeholder post and when you click on it it redirects to the original post in the old instance but if the instance is dead? You finally made me clear that it’s a very complicated issue!

@megsmagik @luca @sarajw It’s not impossible to do. In fact one of the creators of ActivityPub put some thought into this a few years ago, but I don’t think the work has gone anywhere.

https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot5-boston/blob/master/topics-and-advance-readings/activitypub-decentralized-distributed.md