If you want portability, use e-mail. Social media is just a thing to holler into or engage with. If you are interested in particular topics then do the social media and pursue them. If you want to seriously co-ordinate and plan, use e-mail.

The whole thing about moving from centralized to decentralized had a core glitch. Whatever server you signed on would effectively lock you in. What happened if things didn’t go as planned? LOLA is a good step, but it’s still not enough.

Long time ago, URNs were designed to handle URLs that moved. These were permanent resource indicators that would allow the underlying data to move but not break the link. The HTTP redirect codes were supposed to help. Idea was, a website could redirect to a new location so clicking on a link would never get you a 404. It assumed both source and target site were still accessible so source could send the 301, 302, 307, or 308 codes. Very genteel. But what if the source site or account were zapped or suddenly blocked?

Redirect codes work if the owner moved them and has now set up a suggested next location. But it doesn’t handle the negative reasons. Getting forcibly banned, site getting hacked, sites shutting down, owner not paying the bill (for economic, health, or political reasons), anything else that could render the content inaccessible. It’s nice to add constructs to avoid getting account hacked. But what if owner is in jail, muffled, coerced, going through a tough personal stretch, or dead?

They still need to solve for real life and how shit happens.

This is a big one. If this is made possible - to move accounts, that will enable freedom from vendor lock-in. (Or in this case, instance lock-in).

RIP, my lemm.ee account.

I’ve been experimenting with a federated social media system if you used GPG for user authenticity. Userless

They mention early on how an instance going down (or not cooperating) breaks the current redirect system is a downside of activitypub, but how will that change with LOLA?

However it works, I’m excited to see what they come up with

This is one of the most fundamental problems with the design of the fediverse, nd whilst thus protocol does go some way towards addressing it, it feels like a but if a sticking plaster rather than a true solution. It’s something that I think the nostr protocol got right; your public key is your identity, and you sign posts with your private key. You send your posts to multiple servers, and publish the list of servers you’ve pushed as a message, so when people find it, they can also find the rest if your messages. There’s no needs to migrate your account as all of your content is duplicated on multiple servers, and your public key doesn’t change unless you lose the private key. Server owners can decide who’s allowed to post messages on their server, but the duplication means that no one admin can block you completely.

“Yes, let’s name is LOLA, because that’s something everyone on the internet associates with positive things and ease of use and nothing horrible at all.”

Edit - it’s possible I’m wrong on this one, because I’m an idiot.