This is, in my opinion, the most severe problem with the Fediverse.

@julian I think servers should synchronize data between themselves, but the other approach where clients write to multiple servers (as they do in Nostr) is also fine

@mcc @MrCheeze

@mochi Unfortunately, handle is tied to a domain name. If primary gateway is dead, actor should update its gateways array, and thus obtain a new handle.

Actor ID ('ap' URL) is a permanent identifier that doesn't depend on a specific gateway.

@mcc @julian @MrCheeze

@onyxraven @mcc @whitequark it would certainly be interesting but it only solves part of the problem. URIs are an intrinsic part of posts and breaking URI resolution is for most intents and purposes the same as deleting the post. Yes archiving the content would be great, but conversation structure and discoverability would still be gone (unless you can browse the whole Fediverse via the archive like with archive.org).

@caesar @onyxraven @whitequark maybe urls shouldn't be an intrinsic part of posts then? Alternately if we assume all moves are one way we could imagine a directory of dead urls and what new url domains to map them to

@mcc @onyxraven @whitequark I totally agree, they shouldn't. It's a difficult challenge to solve in a decentralised system, so I can understand why it is the way it is, but it's one of the big drawbacks of the Fediverse at the moment and it's why I hate the "just pick a random server, you can always move later" advice that gets thrown at new users (and also why I haven't moved to hosting my own server).

@mcc @onyxraven @whitequark The directory of dead URLs is an interesting idea, but my preferred solution would be a proper migration mechanism where the new server can authoritatively declare that all posts posted from the old server should have their URLs updated to point to the new one.