Well that sucks. But commercially businesses fail all the time. Sometimes you get a heads up and can plan accordingly. And other times it’s like FTX and the site is down the next day, after a major scandal.

The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

The internet owes you nothing.

> The only thing you can do is own your data, running on servers you own, at a domain you own.

No, that’s a failure of the specific protocol. Your identity could simply be a public key. This way it’s:

1) Tamperproof

2) Not dependant on any specific server

If your identity is "simply" a public key, then...how does anyone actually refer to you? By a handle? That's not part of a public key. An avatar? I guess you could generate one à la Gravatar from a public key, but those aren't going to be very memorable.

A public key is a way to securely and uniquely say "this is me". It says nothing about who you are, anything about you, what you like or do, your links to other people, or anything like that.

All that information has to be stored somewhere.

If you're concerned about that, back up regularly, or pick an instance not run by a hobbyist, or run your own, or pay one of the commercial hosters to do it for you.

I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist". Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

Also, you can't back up your followers.

You can't back up your followers, but as long as the old instance exits, is not banned and is cooperative you can move your followers from one instance to another. Yes, that's a lot of "ifs" and doesn't help at all if the instance you are on is already defederated, which was the point that started this thread.

I think Mastodon is a tiny bit better than Twitter in that, at least you have a chance to move as long as things are good. If that makes a practical difference, I don 't know...

I have moved instances, so it made a practical difference to me. I also follow a lot of people who have moved instances and in all cases I only noticed because they posted about it (and hence there are probably more who have moved that I didn't notice).

It needs improvements, such as the ability to move in spite of the old server (the ability to get at your private key so you or the new server can sign an assertion about the move with the old accounts key would be one option which would at least give people the choice of being prepared), and moving over the old posts (there are some stupid concerns about "faking timelines" which you can trivially do anyway, so I think this is a question of time to resolve that - it's not technically hard), but it already does offer significantly more freedom than Twitter.

> I love the moving of goalposts that's happening here. "Just pick a server", "you can always migrate" moves to "you can always migrate if you happened to have picked a server not run by a hobbyist".

There's no moving on goalposts here. I have not replied to you suggesting anything less than this previously, so there were no goalposts for me to move.

> Which, BTW, isn't even a filter criterion on the often linked instances.social.

So don't rely on instances.social if that is a consideration for you. If this matters to you, do your research. Joinmastodon.org does have a filter for "legal structure", but if you care about that you really should read the about page of your prospective server. Or run or pay for your own.

I simply provided you with a list of options if this is a consideration for you. It's your choice whether or not any of those options works for you.

> Also, you can't back up your followers.

Yes you can, though not from the default Mastodon UI. In fact anyone can download your followers list as JSON. What you can't do without support from the original server is to cause your followers to refollow you on the new account, and that is indeed a legitimate flaw that I'd like to see fixed (and it's doable - there are key-pairs associated with the accounts which would allow for signing an assertion about the account moving, and while the server need to have a copy of the main private key there's no reason for users not to be able to get a copy of it). It probably will be - the entire account move functionality is quite new and needs iteration.

you dont need to pick a small server like that man. that's what he's saying.

All servers can communicate. You're not locked into servers. This isnt an MMO... infosec.exchange, the one I use, isnt an exclusive thing. It basically just shows my name as: unloco@infosec.exchange.

I can see and talk to mastodon.social. I can use hashtags and people from other servers will see it just like twitter.

The server you pick is just a name and a local server. If you pick a server that's dying, just move to the next one. You keep everything, it just changes from:

unloco@infosec.exhange to unloco@mastodon.social. You wont lose the friends, just the host name changes.

Most instances follow the Mastodon Covenant, whose promises include giving users three months warning before a shutdown.

https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

If you have exported you data from the instance you should be able to set up your own instance with that data.