last week i was in a conversation with a few people about social media. i guess they were finally leaving xitter and wanted to know where to go. cohost came up and they all made accounts immediately. then i mentioned mastodon and was immediately rebuffed because “sometimes those instances shut down”
whoops!
It’s super easy to migrate accounts on Mastodon. Even works fine to move an account from Mastodon to Akkoma for example.
Your content stays behind, though, and some shut down without warning.
Your posts will not be moved, due to technical limitations.
Content is mirrored on all federated instances and it is very rare for an instance to shut down without notice.
I meant that it’s not directly associated with you as the owner through your migrated account.
Edited comment (many to some).
I don’t think that’s even desirable and also legally questionable. But anyways, these posts are not gone with an instance shutting down and thus I don’t really see a problem. You can always add a link to a mirrow of those old posts in your profile.
thus I don’t really see a problem
Except you no longer can edit, delete, etc. the posts.
You’ve lost complete control over your data, and there’s no way to get it back if your instance vanishes.
edit, delete, etc.
Can you do that with a letter once it is send? And the instance admin of the mirroring server can delete posts if that is legally required for some reason.
And how would that even work technically? Bulk import posts and spam other instances with mass updates? That would immediately detected as a spam-wave and blocked. And back dating technically new messages is also not exactly a great thing to allow.
Other implementations of nomadic identity like Hubzilla get around this by letting you run two accounts in parallel and syncing them from your main account, but they will also not back-port old messages before you linked up the secondary account.
Basically anyone with some experience with federated systems agrees that importing old messages in bulk on account migration will never happen, and I don’t really see an issue with that, since messages are not lost.
This should hopefully get better over time as some instances stick around for longer. You’ll be able to point to instances that have stuck around for a while, which means they’ll probably stick around for some time longer. The problem right now is that the fediverse and many instances are still young, and something that started yesterday is not too likely to still exist tomorrow.
i just have such a hard time wrapling my head around why the fedi is under that level of scrutiny to begin with while everyone assumed cohost would be forever. i had an account there but stopped using it years ago because half the time i tried to log in it was down! come october there will be a plethora of mastodon instances that both predate and have outlived cohost
This will all keep happening until we decide we have been tricked one-too-many times by centralized platforms. The only way to escape the hellish state of the current internet is to pursue options that drag the network back towards its decentralized state; a state where corporations are unable to control who we talk to, what we see, where our attention is for five or more hours a day, every day.
This will keep happening until we abandon centralization and choose and free, open source, decentralized future. Or else the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Honestly that’s why email has stuck around. Can you imagine if one company controlled email? That would’ve enshittified and shut down years ago lol
I agree with the overall spirit, but this is a bit shallow, no? Not much of an attempt to argue its points. It makes some claims, refuses to elaborate, then leaves. Feels written for people who already think the same.
Because of this as well as poor financial management, Cohost will pass out of internet culture with little impact
Would decentralization have helped it make a much greater impact? Would it have helped Cohost survive? Seems to me that financial issues would’ve killed it regardless.
Would it have helped Cohost survive?
Well in theory if cohost was decentralized, the instance that is now shutting down would just be one of many. As it is, it’s one of one, the only one.
Plenty of Lemmy instances have shut down, some less abruptly than others. One cohost instance shutting down is not that remarkable, all things considered. It’s only remarkable cause there’s just one instance.
In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That’s a very different cohost we’re envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.
At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.
I don’t know what Cohost was but I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn’t click on the link because it says “audio” so I expected it to be audio and I didn’t feel like listening to one. It’s a written article though.
I’m pessimistic about Lemmy these days.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
