Alcun Atirutan BBS

Since a lot of folks have started following lately, here are two long threads I've done on this account over the years:
- an ongoing No Man's Sky travelogue, with lots of screenshots, dating back to October 2018 https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/100920861813591323
- my attempt to play through all 100 of Doomworld's Top 100 Most Memorable Doom Maps (just over halfway through so far) https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/104765559869626072

I mention these partly because I'm proud of the work I put into them and partly to point out a poorly-communicated pitfall in Mastodon's pact with users - post histories don't come with you when you migrate to a new instance. See the github issue about it: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
It's a hard technical problem but also absolutely critical, in my opinion, to doing right by users and the social guarantees implicit in federation.

I joined mastodon.social in 2016 when it was basically the only instance in existence. Since then a lot of conflicts have happened and some of them resulted in other communities defederating m.s. There are other instances run by people I personally know and trust that I'd be happy to migrate to, but because my 6-year post history wouldn't follow me, I'm not willing to make that leap.

@jplebreton This is a friction point that has contributed to moving instances being a "too big for me to think about right now" problem.

I'm in the middle of development and trying to maintain this big long thread of my progress. It'll suck to snip that in the middle/lose date stamps if I try to re-post it

Every time I hear someone say "just change instances!" in response to some new cultural/policy/vibe rift I mentally grind my teeth and feel a little crazier because as it stands, that is a destructive action! Some people have probably done it before they even realized what they were losing.

I'm subscribed to the github issue thread and that too has really worn down my sanity over the years, as new people pass through, attempt to bikeshed or You Don't Need That or solve the technical problems from first principles with nearly-zero context, then bounce. My two brief comments in that thread are attempts to improve the signal-noise ratio. I stand by my statement in the latter asking for some official communication about this feature - #PostMigration - from Mastodon project leadership.

Social media, especially character-limit-focused social media like twitter and (vanilla) mastodon, has a reputation for being ephemeral. Peoples' estimation of its value, especially its value as an archive or historical record, or anything you'd want to hang onto for any reason, is low. And yet! As twitter crumbles we are realizing just how much of value will be lost if its archive goes away forever. To a great extent, history is simply the ephemeral in large enough aggregate.

In theory, federation gives us a way to escape silicon valley's vicious capitalist cycles of expansion, decline, obliteration, and rebirth; by letting users truly own their data and walk away with it to someplace new if they want to or need to, preserving identity continuity across the ever-shifting landscape of the free web as they see fit.

Without robust post migration, that implicit promise is unfulfilled. Entire archives are lost when instances go down suddenly without a sunset process.
I think everyone on the fediverse deserves better than that. And if the current technical architecture of the fediverse makes that difficult or impossible, then maybe it's not fit for purpose and we need a new one.

And hey feel free to razz me for my streak of painfully earnest long-windedness here - my point is not simply "my posts are so great they should be on the internet forever", haha - it's that I can imagine the fediverse, or something like it, enduring long enough that enough people build things on it they and others feel are worth keeping around, and I want them to be able to depend on it for that.