Post AmHGNbpvUPRLJVoTFg by dan@brvt.telent.net
(DIR) More posts by dan@brvt.telent.net
(DIR) Post #AmGy9zSz2SvFN6RE3c by feld@friedcheese.us
2024-09-22T20:19:22.966531Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
The complaints about not being able to migrate your fediverse account and all content magically to a new server or platform is completely bogus. This is such a weak minded criticism because it ignores what the fediverse is.
(DIR) Post #AmHExyhZkpZCkJ7aRk by feld@friedcheese.us
2024-09-22T20:24:57.448755Z
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Let's say you have a website at coolsite.com. You may or may not own that domain.For some reason out of your control, coolsite.com is gone or shutting down forever. You move to newpage.net and start putting your content there. You even import your old content.But all the links to your old content are broken forever and there's nothing you can do about it.Do we throw our hands in the air and exclaim that "websites are dead, this will never work"?No, because it's clear that they still work fine after 30 years of this happening over and over.
(DIR) Post #AmHExzd0JJVJcPzRxY by feld@friedcheese.us
2024-09-22T20:31:44.927495Z
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How about blogs in general. Are blogs dead because it's so difficult to move between Wordpress, Pelican, Hugo, etc?No, blogs are doing fine.Having your content be universally reachable ~forever by some portable / nomadic content addressable method is currently science fiction.And you should stop pretending like that's the low bar to acceptance or you'll never be happy.We use browsers. Browsers access the web. The web is addressed by domains.We've spent a decade experimenting with IPFS. It doesn't work great for this problem space.
(DIR) Post #AmHEy0VF3etCKdMlV2 by feld@friedcheese.us
2024-09-22T20:32:56.125772Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
We also didn't give up on email because you can't still be reached at your email address from a dead dial up internet service from the 90s.The internet is a living ecosystem. It changes. Deal with it.
(DIR) Post #AmHGNbpvUPRLJVoTFg by dan@brvt.telent.net
2024-09-22T21:04:36.663568Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@feld with a marginal understanding of technology and a monetary outlay which is negligible to anyone with a salaried job in a developed country, I can *purchase* the domain name, and then when one host shuts down I can copy my stuff to the new host and repoint the domain name there.I've done this for over 20 years for my personal blog (admittedly for at least some of those years I haven't actually _written_ in it), and there's nothing magical about it - it's simply that I was able to choose straightforward/open/easy-to-manipulate formats (HTML, Textile, Markdown) for the source data. Migrating my fediverse presence the same way (I have already tried once and then given up) would be an order of magnitude more complicated if it were even possible.
(DIR) Post #AmHGNcbmcTilhwCgqW by feld@friedcheese.us
2024-09-22T21:07:28.980077Z
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@dan unless the domain is taken away from you. Or the TLD is retired. Or the registrar shuts down and the domain expires and you can't renew it because it's stuck in limbo.There are so many possibilities, and expecting people to be able to understand how to purchase domains is still too much. I've said the same thing for years and expected it to get better. It appears no progress has been made there. Too many people are still too ignorant about this.
(DIR) Post #AmHGNdJjz2snuGlnMW by dan@brvt.telent.net
2024-09-22T21:18:19.410214Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@feld unless the domain is taken away from you. Or the TLD is retired. Or the registrar shuts down and the domain expires and you can't renew it because it's stuck in limbo.Assuming an old-school TLD (com/net/org/iso 3166 country) that's not run by muppets, any of these things happens less often than hosting providers going under and a lot less often than fediverse hosts throwing in the towel.I'm not saying it's a panacea nor is it available to everyone, but it's still a shitload easier than self-hosting your fediverse instance. "It's ok to lose your fediverse presence and have to start again because it's also possible to lose your domain name" doesn't strike me as a particularly great argument given the relative probability of those events.And it doesn't even seem like it'd be especially hard to fix, if the software folk wanted to. A tool to export the database as plain text (JSON, whatever) and another tool to import it in the new place.
(DIR) Post #AmHGNdrPxpozaiWgr2 by feld@friedcheese.us
2024-09-22T23:30:15.265785Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@dan > And it doesn't even seem like it'd be especially hard to fix, if the software folk wanted to. A tool to export the database as plain text (JSON, whatever) and another tool to import it in the new place.Yeah it always looks easy to people who haven't touched the code.First problem is that importing gets you nowhere useful as the entire fediverse only knows about the content under the old URLs.So ok you import your post history ignoring the other technical issues and you've made a mess: you cannot trust timestamps of activities. Everyone sane orders them in the database using a Flake or Snowflake ID which is a type of time-sorted unique hash. This is why your timelines are not truly chronologically sorted. So now you have to be able to backdate these hashes so the import doesn't kill the local timelines by flooding them with old garbage. Mind you that this also puts the data out of order in the tables which is another mess and will lead to performance issues...Ok so now someone added the ability to backdate Flakes. Next problem is the posts have to be imported and data has to be processed. Any mentions of users needs to be resolved. So every user interacted with has to be imported so the links can resolve to the local copy of their profiles. Is their server dead or account deleted? Uhoh, that's gonna break processing the post. Now you've introduced an edge case nobody can really handle reliably.How about deliveries? Now you don't know who the posts were delivered to so if you do want to delete any of them in the future you're forced to spam the deletes go every known server like Mastodon does which is terrible behavior.How about media? Now you have to be able to backup all the media attachments too and restore them onto the new server. Every post with media needs to have the URLs rewritten to whatever the new server's media hosting looks like and (ideally) re-run through their media processing pipelines for security reasons or importing media will bypass your security controls.Likes, favs, boosts? All lost.Custom instance emojis? Broken too unless you move those over and the posts need to be re-processed to fix those URLs tooedit: Jesus Christ, the signatures! Every post will need to be re-signed with the new key or they'll all be rejected by anyone who fetches them. They'd only be viewable in a browser pointed at your server.I guess we just don't care enough to fix this trivial problem :shrug: