Reddit following in their footsteps shortly after

It'll be like a trainwreck in slow motion

Good question. Not sure what the best procedure might be here. Could be as simple promoting them in order of initial mirror deployment dates and the others become mirrors for the newly activated instance.

Triggering the activation could be a part of an instance decommissioning procedure where the operator selects the mirror to become the successor. Maybe there could be some basic system specs and network performance reporting so they could choose the optimal instance. Users would receive a message that their account is being moved to another instance and domain.

In the event of an unexpected outage, there could be a deadman switch style timeout where the fastest mirror activates automatically after the original instance is out for long enough, but also a process for the operator of the downed instance to delay the takeover by signaling, "I'm working on it." In the event of automatic takeover, since users wouldn't be able to receive messages, there would have to be some sort of global lemmy notice system so users of the downed instance know where to go, like a sticky post on the front page or maybe just a separate "notices" page.

Yeah, I'll probably do that at some point, but I think repo issues are supposed to be single topic, so I'll have to do that when I have more time.

I'm no neuroscientist, but that sounds... mega not good.

Except more and more companies are hopping on this gravy train because they can get away with it. At some point (and that point may be now already, depending on the sector), it's going to be difficult-to-impossible to buy anything without this subscription bullshit.

Anything that doesn't incur an ongoing cost to provide should be legally prohibited from being sold as a "subscription."

Oh damn, just made me think, does /c/HydroHomies exist anywhere?

Very open to learning that this isn’t true, if it isn’t.

That's not how this works. If you're going to make serous accusations like that, the onus is on you to provide evidence to support them.

FWIW, I have no particular loyalty to lemmy.ml, I just joined the first instance I saw.

I still see benefits to strong instance identity, it can lead to some interesting dynamics down the line.

Such as?

But it needs to come with a smooth onboarding process, paired with the ability to easily migrate your account to a new instance with no loss of account history.

Totally agree. Like I said, I think the instance should be selected automatically (or at least promoted) by available capacity. It could just sort the list by user count to start and maybe start collecting some performance telemetry on instances to fine tune it later.

The account history is a big one, too. It could even be as simple as having the ability to download/upload your account history in a zip file, then it also serves as a backup. You could even schedule it regularly with the right bot or browser extension.

Another thing I just thought of while I was replying to this is that would be really nice to have is cross-instance authentication. It's kind of annoying when I go to a message context, but then I have to go back and find the message in my inbox to reply.

That explicitly violates the spamming and self promotion rules.

Meanwhile, reddit admins:

___

"Spam" reeks of weak horseshit justification for reddit's actions here. Lots of people x-post all sorts of things all the time. They were itching for a legitimate-sounding reason to ban you and they just reached for the first thing they could find using the loosest possible definition.