Please direct your friends to joinmastodon.org or another instance of your choice like octodon.social, toot.cat or toot.cafe, etc. mastodon.social is "default" choice for a lot of people and it's getting kinda hammered right now.
@Gargron been thinking about migrating away from mastodon.social but don't really want to lose any of my toots/favs/boosts/followers. has there been any work on account portability within w3c specs, or any work on it at all really?
@trwnh I had that fear too, until I took the plunge. I can tell you that it is not that bad, really - you can import your follows, many people will recognize (based on your new follow) that you have moved and will re-follow you at your new home... And you don't need to delete your old account, so your toots will live on.
@frankiesaxx @arx still think we should have true data portability, preferably as part of the w3c spec. more services need to allow for this. right now, i have no real reason to move off of this instance, except to reduce the load. having full portability would allow people to move more easily. same way you can simply import emails to a new server with IMAP.
@trwnh @frankiesaxx Well, importing emails doesn't solve the bigger issue, which is informing everyone about your new email address (unless you use your own domain). For proper portability, you would also need a way to automatically notify all your followers to follow at the new location. But I agree, portability should be (and I believe is?) a long-termish goal.
@trwnh @frankiesaxx Forwarding is one option, but it relies on your previous instance to stay online. An alternative would be a way to prove your identity across instances, but that would require some public / private key stuff (or some other identity mechanism). With that, you could announce from your *new* instance that you have moved, proving that it’s really you and not an imposter.
@arx @frankiesaxx You can forward emails even with webmail. As for follower portability, perhaps a UUID or linking system can redirect them to your new account. Then again, email doesn't really have an analogue for "followers", since it's just 1-1 communication instead of 1-many.