[Timwi]

What I found most exciting while reading this article was the promise that you can “up and leave” and take your data with you without breaking links, because the links are based on a domain name you control.

This is not so in ActivityPub. The data you post is owned by/controlled by the instance you're on. In the language of the article, you're still a row in somebody else's database.

I was on Mastodon for a while until the instance I was on shut down. I naively assumed that I could export and re-import my posts but that was not so. Everything is deleted. I technically have an archive of it in the form of some JSON files, but as illustrated by the article, this is now dead data. The same will happen again if/when my current instance shuts down. The only way around it is to run my own instance, which for the vast majority of people is a ludicrous proposition.

[rakoo]

If we're talking strictly ActivityPub, they're exactly the same: servers where your data lives. AT's PDS give you access to your data, but proper AP servers also do that: you have your collections, and all your activities in them. The trick is to recognize which software is actually a proper ActivityPub software, and unfortunately Mastodon isn't one of them. The current issue is not with ActivityPub.