At the moment the server owner effectively ‘owns’ magazines & communities. Is that the right balance of power? What happens when servers go offline, or server admins go rogue?
In a world where both users and magazines had public and private keys and magazine moderators had the tools to do off-site backups.
Could the magazine moderator then do an unassisted migration to a new place?
They revoke the key that gives the original server the right to host the magazine. They use the key to re-create it on a new server.
Somehow notify all the members the magazine of the new location. The users use their public keys to reclaim their identities and content.
Would that give mods too much power?
It all gets complicated fairly quickly! I think the Bluesky AT protocol is somewhat close to this model for user content, but doesn’t really extend to ‘community’ scale content.
It falls short of a full confederal protocol
I think there should be an easy way for moderators to inform subscribers that they migrated to a new community, similar to how you can migrate a user account on Mastodon. The users can then decide if they want to change their subscription to the new place or not.
But this absolutely should not extend to previous user contributed posts. Community/Magazine moderators do not own these and thus can not just decide to migrate them to another place.
There is a certain trust relationship between the users and an instance operator that the posts they contribute are in good hands and are not data-mined etc. Allowing moderators to take all those posts and move them for example to a commercially run server in a low data-protection jurisdiction like the USA would be a huge violation of this trust.
@poVoq yes this sounds sensible. I think the key is the user themselves having more control over their identity.