[criddell]

The one I hear about most often is account portability. Your Mastodon account is on a specific server whereas the AT protocol account is owned by the user. You can move it wherever you want. It helps protected you from being banned or from losing your account if your server is shut down.

Somebody archived a thread that discusses some of the motivation for AT:

https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/topics/thread-archive-about-...

[jrm4]

This feels like a decent idea that will never actually work (or matter) for most people, kind of like self-signed PGP emails and such?

They're solving an unreal problem that can be solved by "human trust" in a Mastodon-like system. Like, hey everyone, I'm no longer joebob@bluemastodon, I'm joebob@purplemastodon.

[mperham]

And in fact, Mastodon has a mechanism to migrate your account between servers. It has serious limitations (your posts don't follow you, followers do) but it's the best they can do within the AP spec.

[wizzwizz4]

Those limitations are due to the Mastodon software, not the ActivityPub protocol.

ActivityPub provides a mechanism that can technically be used for both post and follower migration – not that I'd suggest using it for that – but Mastodon's account migration feature is something separate. There's no technical reason it couldn't support post migration, except that nobody's put the work (largely social) in to get it past Gargron and implemented.

[cortesoft]

And if someone else has created accounts for `joebob@<all the colors>mastodon`, what do you do? And what if they all start claiming to be the original joebob@bluemastodon?

[kstrauser]

What if I register the email address [e-mail] or [e-mail] and claim to be the original?

More broadly, there are lots of John Smiths in the world. Context is everything: the John Smith in my Bay Area office is different from the John Smith who makes the news in Boston.

[cortesoft]

Right, but my point is that this is a problem that the AT protocol is trying to solve. You pointing out that it is a problem elsewhere is exactly the point; why not try to solve it?

This is especially important for a federated system where individual servers may come and go, and you want to have the ability to move your account if the server goes down or starts doing something shady.

Part of the reason people choose a centralized social media service is because they know their account will last and they can build a reputation. Unless you can move your account and maintain your reputation, a federated system won't have that trait.

[criddell]

The AT protocol is designed to fix this. If email ran on AT, you could take your [e-mail] account and move it to Microsoft or even your own server.

[kstrauser]

Understood, but... was that in dire need of fixing? We're all pretty acclimated to it over the decades we've used email.

That isn't to say we can't or shouldn't improve things. It's more that I'm not convinced the problem here is important enough to justify the complexity of the solution.

[cortesoft]

People have worked around this problem by choosing an account at a well known, long lasting, centralized service.

This is why people have email accounts on gmail instead of a smaller provider; they know the email will last and they can maintain control of it. Same for twitter and facebook accounts.

If the whole point is to get away from centralized services and move to a federated model, that problem needs to be solved.

[criddell]

For some people, it would be a big deal if Google suddenly locked their account. They might say it’s worth it.

[jrm4]

What we've been doing, because you're describing an old-as-dirt problem that in no way is unique to mastodon?

See, e.g. steampowered.com

[cortesoft]

Sure, and what we have been doing to solve this old-as-dirt problem is people pick the big, centralized, social media companies to have their account and identity at, so that they know they will have a persistent identity.

If we want to avoid that, we need a solution to the old as dirt problem.

[jrm4]

But again, I think it's already reasonably solved, by the solution we have now, for email.

Again, a universe of difference between e.g. Twitter (where anything can be revoked and they have ultimate power) and the problems with e.g Gmail (you take some care, you just start over, you start your own server.)

As I tell my students -- from a technical POV, mails from gmail.com and mails from jrm4.com (my personal domain) are just about equal on the Email protocol. This is pretty remarkable and a pretty good system already.

[krapp]

The problem is, none of that is stopping anyone else from being joebob@greenmastodon unless you get there first.

[jrm4]

This is already an old-as-dirt, solved, if imperfectly, problem.

See, e.g. steampowered.com