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What do you think some of the fediverse's primary stumbling blocks are?
The biggest issues for me are:
- No centralisation means there’s no canonical single source of truth.
- Account migration.
- Implementation compatibility.
No single source of truth leads to the weird effect that if you check a post on your instance, it will have different replies from those on a different instance. Only the original instance where it got posted will have a complete reply set–and only if there are no suspensions involved. Some of this is fixable in principle, but there are technical obstacles.
Account migration is possible, but migration of posts and follows is non-trivial, Also migration between different implementations is usually not possible. Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.
Last, the issue with implementation compatibility. Ideally it should be possible to use the same account to access different services, and to some extent it works (mastodon can post replies to lemmy or upvote, but not downvote, for example).
Would be nice if people could keep a distinction between their instance, and their identity, so that the identity could refer to their own domain, for example.
This is one of the ideal use cases for Solid, in development by MIT and Tim Burners-Lee. Basically, you host a central store of data, including one or more user accounts, and allow access to it from other services.
I'd be more comfortable with self-hosting my actual data somewhere, and just having an instance or the central store point to my data. I'd want to get to apply rules for who gets access to my data. It would be a lot easier to spin up a small data store with a few tools on it than a full instance.