meta
@discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk So there's two components to this, really:
1. This is just a fundamental technical limitation of any federated system, it's the same limitation that eg. e-mail has. This just isn't possible to solve (at least in the way you're looking for) without a centrally-arbitrated 'identity registry', which has a whole host of its own fundamental issues.
2. Another way to look at it, is that the server name is *part of* the username. It's true that people often move servers, but at the same time that leaves behind an account-move notice on the old identity, so it should still be just as verifiable as if the account hadn't moved.
While it's certainly true that there could be better verification mechanisms (eg. keybase-like mechanisms), it's also important to realize that this impersonation issue isn't actually specific to the fediverse or even federated systems in general; for example, on Twitter, there has likewise been a long-standing and widespread impersonation issue that wasn't solved by centralized handles either.
If anything, while the verification is still imperfect, the fediverse currently deals with this slightly *better* than Twitter; because there's actually an active mod response here, and malicious accounts will either disappear quickly, or instances that deliberately originate them will be quickly blocked by other instances. Twitter doesn't even have that :/
meta
@joepie91 @discordiankitty Small note: The account move notice isn't dependable. Aside from that it's a natural step and thus can and will frequently be omitted, I've personally run into situations where it just doesn't work, leaving an apparently active version of yourself on another server.
meta
@PastaThief @discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk Huh, that's not an issue I've heard about before. It seems to have worked for everybody I've talked to. Is there an issue filed for this already somewhere?
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@PastaThief @discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk Is that something from just the past week (or any of the other migration waves, for that matter), or has it been going on for longer? My first suspicion would be that it's related to servers being overloaded.
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@joepie91 @discordiankitty No, I've migrated thrice over some years on Mastodon and it's never worked properly for me, although it's failed differently each time. Talking to friends about it long before now produced a general consensus that it's a fairly unreliable feature.
In the specific case I was talking about, it was maybe a year or two ago and the old server simply refuses to acknowledge that the new server has an alias set up, so won't continue to create the redirect. Since I still have access to the account, I retry it every so often. Most recently was about a month ago, with the same results.
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@PastaThief @discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk Ah yeah, that sounds like an actual bug then, not just overloaded stuff. It would definitely be a good idea to file an issue about it, if it doesn't exist yet!
re: meta
@joepie91 Amazingly, I thought, "Oh, I suppose I should..." and went to go reproduce the error so I could write a proper report, and... it worked this time? I don't know if the source server has just updated their software since I last tried it, but I guess I no longer have anything specific to base a report on.
re: meta
@PastaThief @discordiankitty@mastodon.me.uk Heisenbugs are the worst :p
meta
@joepie91 @discordiankitty I didn't file an issue for it, but the situation is still outstanding, so I could.
Generally, migration has been rocky and failure ridden for most people I know who have migrated instances. Failing in the particular way, I'm not sure, but the overall migration process seems to fail more than succeed at this time.