In the mastodon/Calckey world you can migrate your account on one instance to a new account on a new instance and all the people following you will transfer and automatically follow your new account. So you don’t have to be all “Hey moving to [xyz new instance] follow me there!”
That’s something that’s in the works for kbin and Lemmy some day
I’m curious if that works with unfederated servers or servers that simple just get shutdown. Ie xyz government decides to raid the servers, (is there redundancy in the data?)
I guess the main challenge would be proving to the new instance that the old offline instance authorized the transfer, maybe something like a keypair could be generated with each account and a signed proof attached to the user profile that gets federated around as other servers receive user profile objects, then provide an account backup function that lets you save the keys as a file so the importing server can verify the key and federate the change of ownership of content to other instances somehow.
Currently, no. Right now you tell your new instance to expect a transfer from your old. Then you tell your old your new instance and if they match, the transfer begins. In your example, you wouldn’t be able to do half the steps needed so it would fail. And since each server is unique, it would be up to them whether or not there were any backups or not.
Thanks! Are the systems standalone or can they be distributed or mirrored? Seems like a potental single point of failure if the instance is literally running on someone’s personal server.
That is unfortunately beyond my knowledge. I’ve never read up on settimg up an instance so I’m not sure. From the user side, I don’t think most people mirror their instances, since most are volunteers renting space somewhere or running a small home instance for themselves or a small group.
I have seen the owner of an instance announce that they were shutting down in three months and to find a new home on a couple of occasions. Not quite the same, but a similar impermanence.
If you have to move your account to a new instance you’ll lose your post and comment history. Mastodon has an account migration feature so you can leave your instance without losing your history/identity.
Can you explain the migration tools, or lack thereof.
In the mastodon/Calckey world you can migrate your account on one instance to a new account on a new instance and all the people following you will transfer and automatically follow your new account. So you don’t have to be all “Hey moving to [xyz new instance] follow me there!”
That’s something that’s in the works for kbin and Lemmy some day
I’m curious if that works with unfederated servers or servers that simple just get shutdown. Ie xyz government decides to raid the servers, (is there redundancy in the data?)
I guess the main challenge would be proving to the new instance that the old offline instance authorized the transfer, maybe something like a keypair could be generated with each account and a signed proof attached to the user profile that gets federated around as other servers receive user profile objects, then provide an account backup function that lets you save the keys as a file so the importing server can verify the key and federate the change of ownership of content to other instances somehow.
Currently, no. Right now you tell your new instance to expect a transfer from your old. Then you tell your old your new instance and if they match, the transfer begins. In your example, you wouldn’t be able to do half the steps needed so it would fail. And since each server is unique, it would be up to them whether or not there were any backups or not.
Thanks! Are the systems standalone or can they be distributed or mirrored? Seems like a potental single point of failure if the instance is literally running on someone’s personal server.
That is unfortunately beyond my knowledge. I’ve never read up on settimg up an instance so I’m not sure. From the user side, I don’t think most people mirror their instances, since most are volunteers renting space somewhere or running a small home instance for themselves or a small group.
I have seen the owner of an instance announce that they were shutting down in three months and to find a new home on a couple of occasions. Not quite the same, but a similar impermanence.
Gotcha, thank you for explaining. I’m new to Lemmy and have a vague understanding of Mastodon lol, but I’m learning.
I guess they’re talking about migrating your account from an instance to another
If you have to move your account to a new instance you’ll lose your post and comment history. Mastodon has an account migration feature so you can leave your instance without losing your history/identity.