I looked recently into the question 'why does account migration in the Fediverse not port over posts, only followers'.
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I looked recently into the question 'why does account migration in the Fediverse not port over posts, only followers'.
The answer, idiosyncratically summarized, seems to be: because people are scared.
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In #Flancia we'll meetreplied to In #Flancia we'll meet last edited by
Scared of old posts, I mean. The concern seems to be 'what if some of the old posts are bad'.
Well what if they aren't, I say. I'd rather be able to work within a sphere of high trust if every party involved agrees to do that, and deal with exceptions.
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In #Flancia we'll meetreplied to In #Flancia we'll meet last edited by
To expand: the concern from some instance admins (who?) is that people could have e.g. racist or otherwise problematic posts deep in their history, and those would be 'grandparented in' with little scrutiny.
I don't quite get 1. why the normal flow of people eventually seeing those and reporting them is not good enough and 2. why it is suddenly OK for good actors not to be able to perform basic reasonable actions in systems because bad actors might abuse them.
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In #Flancia we'll meetreplied to In #Flancia we'll meet last edited by
I may be missing something, of course, as is very often the case
And I like that some devs and instance owners prefer staying on the ultra safe side of things, because some people and communities do need that kind of protection.But until I hear of further reasons to enforce this restrictive policy on the whole Fediverse, I'm calling this approach [[fear driven development]].
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Julian Fietkaureplied to In #Flancia we'll meet last edited by
@flancian There are also protocol-related concerns. Setting up copies of existing Mastodon posts on a different server changes their ActivityPub IDs, so past interactions would get lost. So you can't meaningfully "move" posts - that would require them to have decentralized IDs, something that @silverpill does work on.
I'm with you that copying post content should be part of account migrations though. @renchap once mentioned that Mastodon wants that too, it's just not urgently prioritized.
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@julian @flancian @renchap Yes, the primary reason why full migration is not implemented is because it is very difficult to do (the solution I proposed is FEP-ef61; it probably needs at least a couple of years to mature before Mastodon can implement it). However, in some cases interactions don't need to be preserved, and various tools for working with Mastodon archives exist, for example https://posty.1sland.social/
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@silverpill @flancian @renchap On of my "rainy month" project ideas is a read-only ActivityPub server that can ingest account history archives (from Mastodon, Twitter, Cohost...) and present the old posts as ActivityPub objects while quietly dropping incoming interactions.
It would enable people to make their old stuff shareable and discoverable while not requiring moderation, and with a few smart URL redirections it could be done almost entirely (except for the no-op inbox) in static files.
