Changing the domain of an existing instance

julian

It occurs to me that once an instance is federating, and especially if follow relationships are established, that renaming an instance (e.g. changing domain names, etc.) is not advisable.

Are there any established best practices, or am I destined to lose all of my followers?

Perhaps maybe as:Move for every actor, though that requires that both source and destination instances be live.

a

julian:

Are there any established best practices, or am I destined to lose all of my followers?

Probably the latter, as this is a Hard Problem. I think the “state of the art” is to have a long-lived domain name which redirects to the current location — see also the PURL concept. Bluesky/ATProto gets around this by having a centralized nameserver, the “placeholder server” that assigns and resolves did:placeholder DIDs. Essentially you will need some stable authority for naming things.

silverpill

@julian FEP-ef61 makes everything domain-independent, including posts.

as:Move will only move followers, but it can work when source is offline too (FEP-7628 pull mode).

SimplyCorbett

@julian @BeAware if by not advisable you mean not possible, yeah.

You won’t be able to reuse the domain/subdomain later on if you take down your instance unless you have a self destruct function. And even then -every- server you’ve federated with has to be contacted for it to work correctly.

It’s fun

BeAware :fediverse:

@simplycorbett @julian *technically* Julian is probably one of the ones that could influence the folks developing AP to fix this somehow. Or at least start the discussion on how it could be fixed.

*He's the creator of NodeBB, Forum software that's starting to integrate AP.

SimplyCorbett

@BeAware @julian oh, I’ll shut up then - sorry.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] LOL I'm no authority (are there any real authorities?)

While I can influence and trailblazer we all have to work together if anything we build is to become reliable.

julian

@[email protected] will have to read through, thanks!

Hoping this doesn't mean I have to refactor my entire note id mechanism to support!

Step in the right direction though.

BeAware :fediverse:

@julian @simplycorbett haha. Hell yeah dude. We're all putting forth ideas!

I'd like to think I've even put forth my thoughts in a way that is influential to those that are actively developing it.

I am just speaking towards your, obviously, very great work in the Threadiverse side of things.

Any ideas and work put towards achieving a better and more complete AP, is the goal!

silverpill

@julian For FEP-ef61 you will likely need to refactor much more than ID generation. This can be done (@mikedev and I did it), and might even be worth the effort, because this FEP not only solves the problem you've described, but also takes ActivityPub to the whole new level.