Background:
- In Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/ActivityPub, your identity is tied to your instance. So if your instance shuts down, you lose all your followers/followees/subscriptions/DMs
- In Nostr, your identity is your public key so your relay can shut down and everything is fine since your identity isn’t tied to your relay/instance.
- BlueSky’s proposed solution to this is to have your username be yourname@somedomainyouown.com. Which requires buying a domain name, which are limited resources, costs >$10 per year, and requires manually configuring DNS records which is not fun.
That’s not entirely true. I migrated my mastodon account a new instance recently. I lost my posts, but everything else transferred or I was able to migrate manually.
How did new followers find you? Your username is literally username @ mastodoninstance.com. I guess you can import/export some stuff, but that all relies on your instance closing down gracefully and giving people time to migrate which is not a guarantee. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience, it was not fun. Granted, I still use mastodon, but it was annoying.
My old account forwards to my new account. Current followers were automatically added to my new account.
Interesting. Looks clunky but solves at least some scenarios
There is identity (who you are as a user, e.g,
@dipshit@lemmy.world) and there is content (which must be on a server which can be accessed by anyone on the web 24/7 in order for things to work). Mastodon has a really portable system, but importing and exporting data requires that server hosting the data be online 24/7 (or at least when you want to access it, which could be anytime 24/7).Bluesky’s proposal is nice and clean, but it refers only to your identiy. If bluesky were to go down, you couldn’t transfer your content out of it until it came back up. I think this is the problem nostr tries to solve with relays but I could be mistaken. either way, relays are just another server that needs to be online in order for the data to be accesses.
With nostr your data is stored in your nostr client (browser or phone app) and with each relay you connect to. The default setting is to be connected to multiple relays. So it’s much more distributed/resistant to outages. And your identity is not tied to the relay itself, so relays can go down and you don’t lose your followers/followees/DMs/etc.
