The other key thing you lose is your identity. In the fediverse, your identity is your Webfinger handle, ie @user@server.com. Your server is literally part of it. Sure, you can migrate to @user@newserver.com, and keep the username part, but your identity still changes.
Truly portable identity via DIDs, ie you can keep your underlying identity even if you migrate servers, is one of the key reasons the Bluesky team made their own protocol. https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub
The webfinger handle does not need to be on the same domain/hostname as the Mastodon server. E.g. not on completely different domains, but for Mastodon it makes no difference, but my personal Mastodon install is on m.galaxybound.com but my webfinger handle is on galaxybound.com.
And there was no need to make a new protocol for a portable identity - a change to ActivityPub to support did's as actor urns would be sufficient, and would also open the door to unilateral account migration fairly easily.
This is my big problem with Bluesky - all of their gripes about ActivityPub would be easily solved in ways that'd make interop a temporary problem of getting people to buy into protocol tweaks, instead of inventing something from scratch.
Their claim that it's not easily possible to retrofit e.g. did's and signed repositories onto ActivityPub makes me question whether they understand ActivityPub at all, because there's nothing about it that would be problematic. E.g. objects are already signed - their mechanism for migration would require some changes to the signing mechanism to allow users to make a unilateral assertion that the key on their new instance belongs to them, but not much more. DID's is down to how ActivityPub clients and servers resolve URLs, nothing more.
You wouldn't even need everyone to buy into these changes - the worst case would be lack of federation w/instances that fail to support it - in other words no worse than starting your own network.
Even then it'd be possible to maintain fairly broad interop by announcing the did's in ways that'd allow also specifying resolvable urls to a proxy.
So, the thing that made Mastodon click for me was when I reminded myself social media doesn't matter. That's really the whole point of this stuff to me. Twitter's long failure began when people were convinced they should make it more important in their lives than it ever deserved to be. When the daily news started to earnestly read nonsense like "X tweeted in response …" for minutes on end, or when the RCMP used Twitter to communicate important public safety information, I felt it in my bones (though I might not have understood exactly why): this was wrong.
I set my Mastodon posts to auto-delete after 6 months so I don't care if I lose them, and I made sure to have some "me" links in the appropriate places pointing at my profile. Even if I were to lose that paper trail from doing proper account migrations, it's pretty easy to say which profile is mine. And if I lose followers, so be it. I'll follow people when I remember who they are. I'll make new posts. If I don't, that's fine. Life happens.
You can indirect webfingers, so @you@site-you-own points to @you@someone-else-owns-this-server.
It's not ideal because there isn't a reverse link; if someone-else-owns-this-server dies, people who were following you on it will see you evaporate. But you can edit @you@site-you-own to point to @you@your-new-site so that at least people holding your ur-name can find you.
But unfortunately, there are few better solutions when someone else owns the data. One nice thing about the Fediverse is you can ameliorate most of this by setting up your own server (though I won't pretend that's going to be the solution that replaces everyone using Twitter; I maintain my own server and it is the same pain in the ass that self-hosting has always been).
The better solution is for implementations like Mastodon and Lemmy to let users bring their own custom domains, and have robust data export APIs. Then even if your home instance disappears overnight you can migrate to a different instance.
Not just in billing, but also in implementation cost and general overhead. I actively avoid buying anything which requires talking to a salesperson to get basic service info; ideally one has something like the Cloudflare self-service model with enterprise upgrades. I know someone currently paying >$800k/yr to Cloudflare who started out a couple years ago with a $200/mo plan.
But then you have to waste a salesguy's time generating a quote for a product that I'm not likely to purchase. I hate doing that. I'm basically stealing from them just because I'm trying to shop around for the best product. I'm calling salesguys and giving all of them my information and getting several different quotes, but I'm only going to execute on one of them. And now they're spamming my inbox every time their company does something even though I've never bought anything from them.
2) Write up what you want, and email ALL the companies you want a quote from... CCing them all in the same email.
Make sure to indicate a close date for them "and all other possible bidders" to submit by.
Now they all know who their competitors are, AND, they know there could be other, extra competitors, AND they know to price as competitively as possible.
The sales people at the other end, and the company, will know if they want to "waste their time or not".
This works well with car dealers too. If you want the best price on a specific make and model with specific options, send to the 10 dealers in a 2 hour drive radius.
I'm sorry I don't understand. The alternative was to have a basic price for the product or service on their website that a person could look up.
Maybe if I'm some big bulk buyer and think I can get a better deal by talking to the salesguy then I'll do that. But if I'm some small fry buying like 1 or 2 of the things I know they aren't going to give me a break, but I still have to go through the "contact the sales person, they call you back, you explain what you want, they generate a quote within 5-7 business days that is good for 30 days after being generated, you end up not buying the thing for whatever reason" rigamarole.
Sidenote: I've never had a vendor balk at me using an "expired" quote to buy something. Our purchasing process never proceeds within 30 days, but turns out the prices don't change either. It is very common to be executing on a quote that's 6 months old.
OP here. Definitely! Both of those are important too, SSB especially, it's been around for so long. Plus Rabble has been vocal in fediverse and Bluesky development and now actively building Nostr stuff.
(And I'm actually all for multiple protocols, especially right now when we're still fairly early in the space's mainstream growth. Much better to experiment with lots of different ideas now while we still have a bit of breathing room!)
OP here. Sure, they finally anounced the new pricing, months late, but all of the evidence in the post that it's effectively unmaintained still stands. The hostile new pricing just adds to the lack of support in convincing me not to waste any more of my time developing for it.
Truly portable identity via DIDs, ie you can keep your underlying identity even if you migrate servers, is one of the key reasons the Bluesky team made their own protocol. https://atproto.com/guides/faq#why-not-use-activitypub