Basically. There was no announcement and no one’s really sure what happened, the server kinda just died one day and the admin never said anything about it.
Would be nice to have some form of account portability that would work after a server vanishes. Like, way to register a pubkey on a server and then register a signed message at another server that this is your new account.
That would be very nice, though how it would be implemented would be difficult. One way it could potentially be done is the new server has to request control from the old one, that would be fairly secure but would introduce the problem of “What if the old one no longer exists?” It could be that there’s a key that you send with your activity to verify it’s you which can be moved to a new instance, but then you run into the issue of how to stop a malicious instance admin from getting your info. You could have a centralized authentication service, though many dislike that because it goes against federation to some extent. I know on Mastadon you can transition your followers, I don’t know how it works but it’s possible they figured out a good solution.
Basically. There was no announcement and no one’s really sure what happened, the server kinda just died one day and the admin never said anything about it.
Would be nice to have some form of account portability that would work after a server vanishes. Like, way to register a pubkey on a server and then register a signed message at another server that this is your new account.
That would be very nice, though how it would be implemented would be difficult. One way it could potentially be done is the new server has to request control from the old one, that would be fairly secure but would introduce the problem of “What if the old one no longer exists?” It could be that there’s a key that you send with your activity to verify it’s you which can be moved to a new instance, but then you run into the issue of how to stop a malicious instance admin from getting your info. You could have a centralized authentication service, though many dislike that because it goes against federation to some extent. I know on Mastadon you can transition your followers, I don’t know how it works but it’s possible they figured out a good solution.
I transitioned between Mastodon servers. I needed access to both accounts to transition to the new account.