Mastodon is obviously an already established and semi-well known social network–A user-owned network of communities. But one of the biggest issues I always see the corporate social media denizens talk about, is that the loss of content when moving instances (sometimes, you have to do this) is one of the biggest turn-offs. And that’s definitely something I can attest to. If I were still on mastodon.social, from my humble posting-beginnings in 2017, I’d have a post history longer than five football fields and probably plenty to cringe at.
The question remains: Why haven’t we been able to take this history with us … if every instance you’ve ever been federated with is keeping that data.
What do I mean by this?
Every single time you post on Mastodon, your words get pushed out to other instances (servers), and in order for people to be able to read what you said, a copy of it is downloaded onto that server. It does this very quickly, so quick that it seems as though it happens in real-time. And, for all intents and purposes, I’m not inclined to believe that it doesn’t.
If you’ve ever had an account on an instance that isn’t mastodon.social, and you have a posting history, and you remember your username: Go over to mastodon.social, create a burner account, and then search up that username.
Yeah, you see that? Your entire body of posting-work is still there, even if you deleted your account, even if the instance you were on is long dead.
This is obviously not true for every server. Some choose to delete old content to make space for the new, but there are many Mastodon servers out there retaining everything ever posted, like mastodon.social.
But what point am I trying to get at here? As far as you’re probably concerned, even if that data still exists, and your account, and instance does not, you can’t access it, right? You can’t reclaim everything you’ve said and done, and put it back where it belongs: Under your ownership.
Or, what if you could?
If you’ve been following my posting history on here in the past week, I’ve been screwing around with Nostr, and musing about Bluesky. Two networks using a similar protocol, that I feel are getting the idea of what I’m thinking of here, only about 75% correct.
Bluesky’s problem, is that the protocol is owned by … the owners. The corporation. Your keys report to their server, and in return, so does your content. A central server that has a lot of different keyholes.
Not really the optimal experience, because you can’t create your own server, and build your own community, and survive if the main Bluesky datacenter goes out, right? The only thing you can do is host your own software that essentially just holds keys and content, and, as far as I know, all of that will be worthless if the devs ever go offline with the main server.
So then there’s Nostr, where all of your data lives everywhere on the network, and as long as you have your keys, you can use any app that utilizes the protocol, and continually access everything you post, forever. You can’t be banned, but you also can’t block anyone. And any random stranger can take your public key from your profile, and view your entire everything (as I’ve said before).
I would say this is also not really that optimal. The idea is great, but the execution trades privacy for extreme versatility.
This brings us back to Mastodon, which is still in active development, still receiving new features, and … well, kind of also only has the whole thing about 75% correct.
There’s that last little bit we’re missing here.
The user should have the option of a community, a personal community away from what’s viewed to be the central Mastodon server and have their privacy, but, they should also be able to retain their posts, and their bookmarks, and their likes, and their lists, and everything else.
How do we accomplish this?
Keys.
The entire fediverse (for the most part) already has all of your content. So, if every user had a key tying them to that content, no matter where you’re located, be it mastodon.social, or mkultra.monster, then you could just go wherever you want?
That’s the idea, at least.
Your content becomes immortal, immutable, and that’s the one missing puzzle piece to ActivityPub. I am 100% sure of this, and I don’t know what the developer stance is on the topic of keys and immutable data, but I fully believe this is something that should be on their roadmap. Yes, storage space is a concern … but holding onto the text content of a post is much easier, and smaller in size, than holding onto larger pieces of data (like photos, and videos). If you scrolled back to five years ago and found something you posted, but the only thing you could see was the text, would you be all that disappointed?
I guess that part is subjective.
Mastodon is already setup nearly identical to Nostr, except users live on the relays. So just … add user generated keys to the mix, and I am 100% double-dippin’ certain that most of the naysayers being spammed by engagement farming on Threads and Twitter will jump ship.
Mark my worms.
If it isn’t. Well. They’re making a huge mistake.