this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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To me, that is a feature, too. The admin team made a decision, and the community engaged, the topic was discussed, and the decision was changed. To me that's a very healthy process. The only thing I would've changed would be LW engaging the community before defederating, but they were understandably worried about legal implications.
Even if LW didn't reverse this decision, you can change instances. Lemmy 0.19 makes this easier with import/export, but I would argue it should be even easier. Ultimately though this is a lemmy implementation detail, and not an activitypub problem.
Your ignoring the thrust of their point:
If you disagree with your instance or want to leave it for whatever reason, you have to wipe your identity and create a new one.
That is in no way a feature, just a hindrance.
you don't have to lose your social graph to move instances though. mastodon has had account migration for years, now.
Lemmy doesn't, since it's not part of the protocol, and in both situations you still lose your actual id.
In general, there's technical reasons why ids and instances are associated on Lemmy / Mastodon, but not UX reasons.
99% of users just want a username, i.e. @bigCommieMouth, they don't necessarily want their identity tied together with the server they use to interact with the network, i.e. @bigCommieMouth@kolektiva.social, and if they did really love a specific server and wanted their identity tied to it, they could always just make @bigCommieMouth_kolektiva_social.
>there’s technical reasons why ids and instances are associated on Lemmy / Mastodon, but not UX reasons.
...right...
>99% of users just want a username,
literally 100% of users have used this system regardless of the fact that identities are tied to services.
So? 100% of users never used the fediverse before it existed. Bluesky / ATProtocol is now offering an alternative where usernames are not tied to instances, and that sounds like a better UX.
so go there
bye
If you don't want to discuss the relative merits of Bluesky, don't participate in a thread on Bluesky.
bye
i thought this thread was about me correcting misunderstandings about activitypub software. i have no interest in bluesky until/unless they either aferro gpl their code or implement activitypub federation. there are no merits to their network that i can see unless one or both of those come to pass.
I don't see a title saying "self post: let me correct you about the activitypub protocol", I see a link to Bluesky launching federated storage.
Then don't engage in a discussion about their identity system, just post a blanket comment saying "they suck cause they're not open enough" and leave the thread. The rest of us are here discussing the relative merits of one protocol vs another.
That's true, but it's not an inherent limitation of ActivityPub.
Isn't it?
Your ID, along with the canonical data associated with it, is tied to your instance. That's how the protocol works. There's no mechanism for decoupling all that.
Mastodon has a half-hearted migration feature.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
Good to see there's at least a proposal though.
Any service can implement this today, with activitypub. Being an enhancement proposal is just an attempt to standardize extensions to ActivityPub, lots of the time that services have already implemented.
But it is an inherent feature of ATProtocol
https://xkcd.com/927/
I think about this often, but I wouldn't consider ActivityPub a settled on standard just yet...