I was thinking about account portability. While I haven’t had to migrate instances myself, it does seem like it would be highly inconvenient. How do you let people know it’s the same account?
The traditional way is to leave a notice on the old account, but what if that’s not possible (e.g. the old instance shut down suddenly). It would be better to have a way to automatically let people (and instances) know that the new account is the same user as the old one - so that subscribers stay subscribed, and there is no confusion.
With optional cryptographic signing for account identity, this issue could be ameliorated. The user could keep the private key, and share the public key with Fediverse instances.
What do you think?
Please note: I’m not talking about replacing any existing functionality, only adding to it.
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There’s a whole task force at the W3C looking into this. It is a complicated area, but there is a proposal (LOLA).
this has been implemented in hubzilla as Nomadic Identity which allows an identity to have redundancies as well as portability.
