a problem with activitypub federation (what mastodon is built on) is that it was built for sharing between centralized systems. it doesn't federate or decentralize identity or content (as anyone who has had to migrate servers knows)
the equivalent of moving house requires changing your address, name, and abandoning all your possessions. there isn't any mail forwarding available but they'll put a little note on the mailbox.
@gintoxicating (I'm biased but) it's a shame that webfinger isn't better integrated into the activitypub world.
Overall, though, I think the AP approach isn't all bad. I think "data portability" is often bit of a red herring – data has context, and blindly porting data from context A to context B is often pretty "weird."
We (humans) are pretty comfortable creating new contexts! The effort we put in doing so *is* the value.
@gintoxicating the worst thing about centralized services in my view is that the cost to create a new social context is so high – you basically need to convince everyone to switch systems if you want to do anything different!
In that respect, ActivityPub is useful in that in creates a transport for content, but doesn't really say anything (to users, at least) about the social context of that content. Existing implementations don't really take advantage of webfinger in that respect.
@gintoxicating rather than tying identities 1:1 to a feed (
), ideally we'd have stable identities that can point to many feeds. If I want to start posting about power tools but my audience is here for my mosstodon content, it'd be nice to be able to expose that as a new feed *alongside* the existing one but also make it discoverable using my existing known identity. We have all the standards we need to do this, but implementations (stares in mastodon) are pretty dumb about it.
