Fediverse

I think being able to migrate your identity from one instance to another is a core requirement to fulfilling the promises of federation. The idea is to be able to freely leave a bad instance, but all you can do now is completely start over on a new instance, losing all your posts and followers. That's way worse, and not how it should be imo. No big instance has gone rogue yet afaik, but as soon as one does this will be a major issue!

To really accomplish that we would have to create a mechanism for a user to own their own identity, e.g. in form of some sort of secret key file. This would introduce a huge number of usability issues though! Handling key files is really hard, so that's probably not an option in the near future.

What we definitely should add is some sort of instance single-sign-on, so you can log into another instance by having your original instance authorize the login attempt. This should then allow the new instance to use your original account (for subs and posts), and also migrate that account to the new instance (update handle on all your posts, migrate your followers, ...). This would be a bit worse than owning your identity, because your original instance could just refuse to authorize any SSO attempts, but it would still be a big improvement imo.

Maybe we can also just combine the two, so instance SSO and being able to download an identity key as backup.