| > > The DID system uses the recovery key to move from one server to another without coordinating with the server (ie because it suddenly disappeared). > Why is this necessary? The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing is incredibly low. The likelihood of a server just randomly disappearing at any point in time is low. The likelihood of said server disappearing altogether, based on the 20+ years of the internet, can & will approach 100% as the decades go on. Most of the websites I know in the early 2000s are defunct now. Heck, I have a few webcomic sites from the 2010s in my bookmarks that are nxdomain'd. Also, as noted by lapcat, these sudden server disappearances will happen. Marking this problem as a non-issue is not, in any realm of possibility, a good UX decision. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883409 This is coupled with the fact that Mastodon (& ActivityPub in general) don't have to do anything when it comes to user migration: The current system in place on Mastodon is completely optional, wherein servers can simply choose to not allow users to migrate. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35883570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35884682 > There are community standards and things like the Mastodon Server Covenant that make this essentially a non-issue. *The Covenant is not enforced in code by Mastodon's system, nor by AcitivtyPub's protocol.* It's heavily reliant on good faith & manual human review, with no system-inherent capabilities to check if the server actually allows user data to be exported. > You're storing all of a user's post history on their own device in the case of an immediate outage. That's equivalent to Gmail storing all of your emails on your device in case you want to immediately pack up and move to another email provider. That is an extremely high cost (I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally) for an outcome that is very unlikely. An outcome *that can still happen*. As noted by the incidents linked above, they're happening within the Mastodon platform itself, with many users from those incidents being unable to fully recover their own user data. Assuming that this isn't needed at all is the equivalent of playing with lightning. |