In Mastodon/Lemmy/Kbin/ActivityPub, your identity is tied to your instance. So if your instance shuts down, you lose all your followers/followees/subscriptions/DMs
In Nostr, your identity is your public key so your relay can shut down and everything is fine since your identity isn’t tied to your relay/instance.
BlueSky’s proposed solution to this is to have your username be yourname@somedomainyouown.com. Which requires buying a domain name, which are limited resources, costs >$10 per year, and requires manually configuring DNS records which is not fun.
That’s not entirely true. I migrated my mastodon account a new instance recently. I lost my posts, but everything else transferred or I was able to migrate manually.
How did new followers find you? Your username is literally username @ mastodoninstance.com. I guess you can import/export some stuff, but that all relies on your instance closing down gracefully and giving people time to migrate which is not a guarantee. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience, it was not fun. Granted, I still use mastodon, but it was annoying.
Background:
That’s not entirely true. I migrated my mastodon account a new instance recently. I lost my posts, but everything else transferred or I was able to migrate manually.
How did new followers find you? Your username is literally username @ mastodoninstance.com. I guess you can import/export some stuff, but that all relies on your instance closing down gracefully and giving people time to migrate which is not a guarantee. I had this happen early in my mastodon experience, it was not fun. Granted, I still use mastodon, but it was annoying.
My old account forwards to my new account. Current followers were automatically added to my new account.
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
Interesting. Looks clunky but solves at least some scenarios