Is having one account across all instances a possibility with this network someday?
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@Obbly I don't think that is a goal of this project. Think of it as being similar to email, you don't need email addresses on every mailserver, but you might want multiple ones on different servers for different purposes. That's about what Mastodon aims for. ("Different servers" being a little more important since every server is its own community with its own rules and stuff)
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@noiob ah I get that and that's cool. But It does worry me that we may be too dependent on instances? I haven't looked under the hood of mastodon (nor would I have the skill to) but I'm assuming if this server is destroyed so is my account and my "toots" ? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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@noiob Okay, that's eased my mind slightly thank you. Would be cool if we could back up our accounts offline like a bitcoin wallet though don't you think. Or is that already a feature as well?
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@Obbly you can export and import your follower list, your blocklist and your list of muted accounts. I don't really get what you want, a bitcoin wallet is fundamentally different from a Mastodon account.
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@Obbly an important part of a Mastodon account is the fact that other instances have subscribed to updates from that account (i.e. told the account's home instance "please tell me whenever there's an update from this account"). Restoring that information from a file would be very hard to implement without security flaws. (Say, a server tells your instance "this user needs to follow this other user because I'm loading a backup right now)
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@noiob aye, sounds tricky to do. Would be a nice feature though.
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@Obbly Yes, other instances do cache your toots (if you have followers there) but your account lives here. I've been thinking of creating a tool to make backups of all one's toots (similar to twitter archives) though