The linked post shows how most non-tech people’s understanding of email is very very different from most of the people here.
I’m really disappointed with Lemmy’s idea of federation: all it is is a bunch of servers mirroring one another, but the user accounts are server-bound. No jumping instance and taking your identity seamlessly with you.
This is exactly like email though.
You have a gmail account that is tied to google. You have to login to gmail to access your email but you can email anyone in the world. Some people use different providers so they have different email addresses.
If you want to change providers there is no easy way to do it. You can use imapsync or export to pst and import to new provider and so on, or maybe your new provider gives you tools for importing mail from your old mailbox but it’s not a feature of email protocol(s) to do this.
This isn’t really Lemmy’s idea of federation, it’s just ActivityPub, the underlying protocol. Having a mechanism for jumping servers is unfortunately quite complicated and it isn’t clear how it should be done or if it is even possible.
Lemmy does allow you to export and import your settings though, so you can kinda do it but you lose your history.
Unfortunately you can’t just change the ID format as it would require a breaking change to the protocol.
ActivityPub spec allows content-addressed IDs, just nobody implemented them and now it’s too late.
The problem as I understand it is basically that user IDs in ActivityPub are intrinsically tied to the domain on which the user registered, so you can’t really move a user from one domain to another.
AFAIK the Nostr protocsal sorta let’s you hop around, but it’s full to the brimwith cryptobros, and I’m still not sure how moderation works there.
Yea moderation becomes a big problem once you can’t actually block people. I don’t like that Nostr describes itself as censorship resistent or even censorship free, that’s not a good quality.
