this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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Not exactly a surprise. It was known it will happen ahead of time: https://archive.is/EaSjE
I thought it already happened when I first saw that post. I'm surprised they didn't try to figure something else out and kill it sooner.
I don't think they could do anything about it. As far as I know, Mastodon doesn't support any kind of instance renaming, so the hostname is one thing you cannot change. You can only spin up a completely new instance.
I thought they'd already shut down. Renaming isn't an option, but you can at least direct your users to the new instance.
I figured they would have almost instantly gone read only and prepared the self destruction. But I guess they just closed off registration and set the self destruct pretty far out.
Who's bright idea was it to integrate the domain name itself directly into the software such that changing the domain name totally fucks up the whole thing? Is there actually a good reason for this to not work like any other website where the domain name is just an address and changing it doesn't actually have any effect other than requiring users to type in or bookmark a different URL?
Federation combined with keeping the historical federated data consistent is certainly a bitch. We can't have it all. It could be like email that only handles delivery at any point in time and history is purely local, but Mastodon specifically keeps the federated data public. Propagating the change on the historical data to the federated instances would be nearly impossible. I don't see how it could have been done better without sacrificing something else.