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by ChrisArchitect
595 days ago
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Good post of historical reminders and I appreciate the framing of bluesky's identity approach. Never was sold on Fediverse/ActivityPub as being it and not a fan yet of Bluesky's slow-building-in-public approach but am intrigued by this key facet of the main role the personal domain takes. How can one easily change/migrate their AT identity if they change domains? How is their whole social history transferrable? Like that was one of the problems/unclear things to most about Mastodon - that it actually wasn't that easy to move instances because sure your identity could move but your posts would be on the old instance, so it wasn't really that portable. I'm all about the permanence and data preservation, so I don't want to commit to a platform now without assured control over my data and ability to maintain history/identity in a move. Have enjoyed the centralization and longevity for too long on a place like Twitter to get all loose and ephemeral now. |
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Go into settings, click change handle.
Type in the domain you wish to change to. Click next.
It’ll give you some stuff to put into a DNS TXT entry on that domain. Do that. Click “verify DNS record.”
And that’s it. You’re done. Everything is “transferred.”
The history is transferable for the same reason a domain is transferable to another web host: what does URL stand for again? Uniform resource locator? That is, it’s how you locate something, not what that something is. In this case, the domain isn’t actually your identity: your identity is your DID, “decentralized identifier.” To hand wave slightly, all your content is signed with your DID information, not the URL you use. There’s a service that resolves domains to DIDs. So changing your domain means changing what that service resolves to. That’s why I put “transferred” in quotes above; when changing domains, nothing actually moves.
Now, if you want to change the server where your data is hosted, your PDS, it’s effectively the same thing: you spin up a new server, backfill your data by a backup or by replaying it from the network, and then say “hey here’s a new PDS” to the network.
All of this is possible because of the fundamental design choices atproto makes over the ones ActivityPub does.
Happy to answer more questions. But if data ownership and preservation is a thing for you, you should like atproto.