Hi there,
I went through the documentation of GoToSocial and there are some pieces of information which confuse me. For example on the Deployment considerations, they state, that once you hosted a particular Fediverse service on your domain, you cannot switch to another technology. Further down in this article in the “Domain name” section it even gives me the impression that if you switch technologies on the same domain, this will in fact cause issues in the whole Fediverse.
Two questions came up when reading through this:
- Is the ActivityPub protocol and the technologies that depend on it that fragile? Switching technologies on the same Domain would be something I would have just done without a further thought until I find the technology I want to use for years (and which I might still switch out to another one many years in the future).
- It is not clear from the documentation if you can get around this by hosting the service I want to try under service1.example.com instead of example.com. The documentation states, that you can host your users under user@service1.example.com, but the API services still under example.com. This will not solve the root issue, right?
Getting a new domain for each Activitypub service I might try to implement and test / use does not really sound great to me. Maybe I just did not understand all of that properly and there is no issue?
The main issue is when your instance starts federating, accounts are created with a key pair that you will lose when changing software, and generally a whole bunch of URLs will no longer be valid. The actor ID of your user is
https://feddit.org/u/buedi, not justbuedi. Mastodon might make ithttps://feddit.org/@buediinstead. As per the spec, that is the canonical URL for the user/actor.Other instances will still try to push content to your instance assuming the software it was registered with. So you may continue to receive data for Lemmy communities which Mastodon has no clue what that is or what to do with it.
You can host the API/frontend on a different domain no problem, but the actual ActivityPub service should be on a dedicated subdomain to avoid the issues.
That said, I believe after a couple days/weeks, it should eventually sort itself out as your instance keeps erroring out and gets dropped and reregisters with the new software.
