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My "position" on #Wildebeest — and really all #ActivityPub software — is as follows: If it lets you migrate your followers in and out, sure, give it a try; If it does not, you should be VERY wary of using it for your important accounts.
Wildebeest does not let you transfer your followers to/from it, ergo it should not be used, lest you find yourself locked-in to Cloudflare's ecosystem forever. Whether or not you like #Cloudflare is irrelevant, you should not tie your fediverse identity to any company permanently.
It's very frustrating for me to see even large ActivityPub implementations that have been around forever not implement follower migrations. Even #Pixelfed doesn't (although I hear that may be coming this year). Anyways... I asked them if they might implement it, but I don't exactly have my hopes up. https://github.com/cloudflare/wildebeest/issues/238
@jonah I have not done an exhaustive search, but so far as I have been able to tell, no one supports actual account migration as an average user would expect it to work. Just follower migration. Do you know of ones that do full migration (including posts)? Or are you saying that lots don't even allow follower migration?
@codesmith I'm not a expert on things other than Mastodon really, but AFAIK at this time the only AP servers that even do follower migration are Mastodon and Pleroma. Not Pixelfed, not Misskey, not PeerTube, not Wildebeest, etc. etc.
I don't know of any at all which do full migration with posts and everything, which would certainly be even better than follower migration, but with all the complexity around how that would affect post permalinks and everything it seems a lot more reasonable for that to not really exist at the moment.
I think for most people the ability to retain their audience is far more important than the ability to retain their old posts, IMHO anyways, and I think that a lot of people are creating their profiles on platforms — maybe assuming that it has the same migration functionality Mastodon has — which trap their audience there, which is concerning to me.
@jonah Interesting. I was not aware how rare follower migration is.
I agree that generally people care more about follower migration than true migration, but I've seen a lot of relatively new accounts rather upset because they were told that in the Fediverse you can migrate your account any time you want. And to the average person, "migrate your account any time you want" does not make them think "oh this means I can migrate my followers but none of my content." They think it means everything. So I think if Fediverse devs are thinking true account migration is years out, if ever, then we all really need to be careful with our lingo and call it "follower migration" rather than "account migration."
@codesmith this is a good point, it is confusing.