Hi, my train of thoughts started with my “home” instance Lemmy.ml disabling the creation of communities. I did write this already somewhere as a comment, but I think it deserves its own topic ;)
TLDR; I have 2 big questions: do admins have too much power? Should an account be easily transferrable to another instance?
To be clear: I have no problems with that decision. I understand it. What I am writing here is a theoretical issue.
Let me explain:
So, the current problem is not being able to create a community on Lemmy.ml, so on Lemmy in general, for all Lemmy.ml member. The solution is easy. Create and alt account on another platform, create the community, make my prime account the mod et voila, problem solved.
However, my “problem” is theoretical. I joined Lemmy.ml “per accident”. I did not pick it for a specific reason, I just stumbled on it (being a Reddit refugee) and selected this instance. (I know now that this instance will always “do good” because it is run by the creators of Lemmy (I did not know this when joining) - so my issues will probably always be theoretical FOR ME, but hear me out. ). If someone would join another instance, and that instance would suddenly stop providing essential services of Lemmy (let’s say, commenting, participating, cross posting or any other feature) OR if the instance would stop alltogether, you kinda loose everything. Yes, you can create an alt, but your post/comment history belongs to the other, severely limited in features, account - or the account is lost forever. I think, from a theoretical standpoint, I would feel better if I was able to “move” my main account to another instance. Not sure how this would technically work (federating accounts might be a huge GDPR / privacy nightmare), but it would give me some peace of mind knowing that I can’t be… euh… fucked over by an instance admin.
I know you can run your own instance to circumvent these issues. I am considering it since my account is stil fairly new, but it seems like a tedious thing, both in technical knowledge as in financial terms. And with the federation/discovery thingy that is around on a not-well-used instance, this is even more difficult.
My 2 cents. Not sure if I’m missing something and/or if someone agrees/disagrees with me?
What you want is commonly called “nomadic identity”. There is probably going to be limited support for it in Lemmy similar to the account migration feature in Mastodon, but ActivityPub wasn’t really designed with this in mind.
I had no idea it even had a name. I’m learning a lot these days! Thnx!
Yea … it’s basically a natural limitation or friction point of the fediverse and ActivityPub, so the topic comes up repeatedly as people keep independently coming upon it themselves.
IMO, once some sort of general solution goes mainstream, and there is decent “nomadic identity” across the fediverse, it will effectively be fediverse 2.0, and, IMO, can only then truly deserve the moniker fediverse.