Comment on lemmy.fmhy.ml is gone [update from the team]
redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.com 1 year agoI got curious so I start digging into how mastodon do it. It’s more like a hack, really. Mastodon uses WebFinger to resolve user account, so when you change domain, you can leave the old domain up so your federated servers can still resolve your users and realized the domain has been changed and update their federation data. But it turns out you can’t exactly retire the old domain either because it’s still tied to user account internally. So if you lose control of your old domain, you’re probably as screwed as fmhy.ml.
r00ty@kbin.life 1 year ago
Yeah, which is why I think storing remote user and instance public keys might be better. Then that can be used to authenticate the migration request (it'd probably need to be an extension to the activitypub standard).
The biggest problem I see is that an instance doesn't know about all the instances that have data pointing to them. So how does it communicate the changes to everyone? The mastadon way is probably the sensible way to do it, despite not supporting the loss of control of domain scenario.