So apparently the big flaw with ActivityPub is you cannot switch platforms for a domain. Once you've tied a domain to your fediverse instance, that's it. 

There's a key tied to the domain, and switching platforms will generate a new keypair, but the old keypair is still tied to your domain. So requests that go from a remote instance to the new instance will fail because it's expecting a different key. 

I mean, maybe there's a way to transfer the old keypair to the new instance. But I don't know how that'd be done. Would probably require database tinkering which isn't super fun. This also assumes that you have full access to the old instance, and nothing unexpected has happened.

Luckily I have no need to do this, Firefish is great and I am satisfied with it. However, being locked down to a platform doesn't exactly scream digital freedom. The keypair is also obviously essential to authenticating requests, so I get why it's there.

This is all my basic understanding of the problem after talking to @578bac63 about it last night, as they are currently facing this issue. I may have misinterpreted how this all works cause I don't have enlightened cartoon wolf brain, but I found it kind of a fascinating problem and idk if all that many folks are aware of it?

Anyways yes, thought completed, back to cartoons ​:drgn_lol:​ 

 @9ed2bbb7 @578bac63 Yes, technically, you could transplant the private key over, and also the private keys of all the users on the platform. I've poked around the Mastodon database and the layout isn't too complex, but mileage may vary with other platforms. This is why I'd usually recommend doing some digging and signing up for various instances running different software before diving in and self hosting :3