[piccolbo]

But that's enabled by the DNS MX record. There isn't anything like that for social AFAIK, so if you wanted to do the same with your mastodon account you are hosed. Some people are saying once you have million followers on mastdon.social, you are not going to restart from zero on mastodon.net. You can, but it's hard. So centralized or federated, without handle portability, it's not very different. You are stuck. It seems to me federated mail and federated social are similar for people who don't own their DNS entry (gmail addresses), but for people like you, that's a substantial difference. You'd have to run your own instance to have your own social handle, and that isn't portability, that's DIY. It only works for a small number of techies, you have to have an instance and a domain.

[js2]

> so if you wanted to do the same with your mastodon account you are hosed

I don't believe that's true:

https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-own...

Also https://masto.host/how/ and https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/8/mastodon-is-just-blogs/

[toofy]

> Some people are saying once you have million followers on mastdon.social, you are not going to restart from zero on mastodon.net.

i think we should have learned by now that when “some people are saying…” we should be very skeptical if those claims are based in reality.

in this case, they’re not. if you wish to move from .social to .net you move your account and your million followers go with you.

[aendruk]

> anything like that for social

If I understand correctly, /.well-known/webfinger should do the trick.

I’m “at” the same long term domain in several protocols—

  @name@mydomain # ActivityPub
  @name:mydomain # Matrix
  name@mydomain # Email

—and none of those services are actually run by the server behind the A record.