[devttyeu]

You can download and keep your data and keep a backup, it's all content-addressed (like git repos), and just upload to another instance

Like moving from GitHub to GitLab.

Each instance then has its own moderation policies, again, kind of like GitHub. But your identity is still your identity, and you can keep a copy of your data.

[spiderice]

> You can download and keep your data and keep a backup

> and you can keep a copy of your data

Is this really a selling point / concern for anyone? I’ve never heard anyone express that the problem with tradition social media is that they can’t download and keep a backup of their data. Its about a central corporation being able to decide what is allowed to be said.

[devttyeu]

That specifically is not the selling point, but it is how one of the selling points works.

You can just take your data to another instance whenever you don’t agree with the policies of your current one. And all your connections/interactions/data should stay intact.

If it works as well as it seems to in the federation sandbox, you shouldn’t even be able to tell that you’re using a different service, the app just sends requests to a different server, and the web url may be different, and your default feeds are generated somewhere else.

Now, you may say that users won’t care about backing up their data, but that can be solved with some open (or paid) archival services.

[afiori]

It is not about backups but about transferability of content and identity