>If Twitter shuts down, you’ll lose your followers. If Facebook shuts down, you’ll lose your friends. For some platforms, it’s not a question of “if”, but “when”.
Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?
Wouldn't this happen as well if the instance my account was created in shuts down?
Also, the stuff that has already been tooted lives on in the fediverse in other servers, so it's not like the toots also disappear from other servers after an extinction event, just like an email server going down doesn't delete the email from everyone else's inbox.
How about backing up accounts in other servers? These could be encrypted with a key which only the user controls. Or perhaps the backup could be done encrypted in cloud storage like S3 (this would involve a paid account, obviously) so the user's presence could be resurrected in a different server?
It might also be dandy to have "failover" agreements, where one server can agree ahead of time to failover users for another server, in case of failure.
If you own your domain name you can have a provider die, and you'll still be able to re import your data on a new provider, assuming you're able to set up a DNS
And that's where you lose most non technical users I guess?
Compare to email, where the MX record provides a layer of indirection. ActivityPub technically has a feature like this using a .well-known file, but it leaks into the user interface n unpleasant ways.
Couldn't Keybase.io solve this? It could track your identities on these servers, and it would exist outside of any instances or federation, but be the source of identity that would go along with any federated instances you are a part of
The issue with distributed systems that rely on public keys is the lack of options to turn to if the keys are lost or compromised. And yes, people will lose keys. Systems that rely on keys for identity need to figure out what options people have at that point to re-establish their identity.
Maybe my way of using Twitter is particularly weird, but I'd be more disappointed if I'd lose the thematic lists of interesting Twitter accounts that I have collected over several years at this point than if I'd lose my followers.
The above is also the main reason my pasts attempts to switch from Twitter to Mastodon have failed. There's quite much people and content in the Fediverse now, but still not enough that matches my particular combination of interests.
That said, it's wise to maintain a backup account on a different instance. Right now one of my instances is down for unknown reasons, but almost everyone who follows me there also follows my other account.
1. You can readily extract your information.
2. And re-import it elsewhere.
3. You can run your own instance.
(I've had a couple instances die and / or fade on me, which is why I maintain a few presences.)