Sad for all those accounts on #MedMastodon after the server disappeared. I hope this make it even more clear that #mastodon needs way to let users own the data and allow it to be easily ported between servers.
People don't feel safe on small servers or often don't understand how easily it can disappear.
@stefan the other option is that people could stop depending on a random stranger to run a server for them.
@evan perhaps. though even a well known active server admin can drop dead and the server shut down before folks know what has happened.
@stefan so, like I said, having someone you don't know, with whom you have no connection, run your server, means you don't have much recourse if they decide to shut down.
Having a server run by your employer, your university, a membership organization, your city, or a SaaS provider means you've got some idea that it's going to be there next week.
We have a system of low affinity between server operators and users.
@evan I wonder what is the best way for users to fully grasp those trade offs? I don't know how much folks think about it. certainly moments like this might bubble up but who knows.
@stefan I don't know either. It might be something we need to encourage people to do at signup time. "Does your employer have a server? Does your university have a server? Are you a member of the ACM, or SDF? Can you pay $6/month for a hosting service? Want to join a cooperative like social.coop? OK, if *none of those things* is true, here is a list of servers that provide open registration to the public for free, on a best-effort basis."
@evan I could also imagine a 3rd party that gave servers a resilience rating of some kind. Not an absolute fix but frame work to talk about level of commitment. The Server Covenant is a great start but not well monitored.
The issue here isn't ownership of Data, but maintaining the actual server. You can't port data between servers if one server is just gone. Ownership doesn't matter when the data gets wiped.
You have to do regular backups of your data on the server you are on. So that if this happens you can at least find a new server and upload the backed up data.
If anything there needs to be a way to backup and upload actual posts, cause right now that functionality is non-existent unless its your own server.
