I agree with Cory that being reliant on a single organization puts us at risk. But disagree that Mastodon (as much as I like it) is the solution.

The thing with account portability is to understand Why someone moves from a server or service to another, and then How.

If you’re initiating the move because of some philosophical difference with the server admins, or if it crashes often, or is gracefully shutting down, there’s one path. But if you’ve been summarily blocked from access or there’s malicious behavior (i.e. DDOS), there’s another flow that needs to be addressed.

Even there, are you completely blocked or just from posting? , You could theoretically still access the APIs to move your stuff away vs. a hard block.

There’s also the matter of forwarding addresses. Again, depends on the Why and How.

But the most important issue is that when you move, you want to lose as little as possible. That means your posts, comments/replies, likes/unlikes, who you follow, and those who follow you, as well as any media being hosted on that site.

Ideally, you pack up everything, go somewhere else, unpack, and everything works as before. But in reality, you’re lucky just to get any of your posts out. There’s a fairly high cost to a move, which will create friction (if you initiated the move) or total loss (if initiated by mods or malicious actors).

Neither Bluesky, Mastodon, Lemmy, or any other Federated or centralized solution out there lets you handle all the above permutations and scenarios. You’re still screwed if you get banned. You still will lose a lot, have to recreate a lot to get close to being where you were.

And there’s a reason for that. Nobody likes to spend valuable tech cycles working on features that get people OUT of their service. They’ll do something as an abstract idea, but they’ve only got so many cycles and, unless required by legislation, they would rather spend them on fixing bugs and adding features over something that leads to fewer users.

So until someone comes up with a workable, perfect solution to COMPLETE portability, which is what Cory really wants, you might as well enjoy the features and communities on whatever service you’re on.

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I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will

i’ve done this so many times since the 1990’s (before it was called social media) and i think seeing history repeat itself on the lemmyverse because of the liberal/leftist divide is the first warning sign.

Like: when your service is on the brink of being shut down by its investors, who demand that you compromise on privacy, or integrity, or quality, in some relatively small way, are you really going to stand on principle? … it’s leverage that enshittifies a service.

i think that this is the key part of the story. every time i left a social media platform it was because of this with reddit being the most recent example. the defederation-happy instances have already started using their leverage from their userbase size and once they start getting money, the enshitification will take off and i want to believe that it isn’t the first nail in the coffin for the lemmyverse.

at least the fediverse will like still be around, like the article says, after they’ve captured legal control of the lemmverse and i find myself looking for a new platform again.