#FediAdmin question: I'm wanting to experiment with running my own fedi instance, but I'm not entirely certain what software I will end up settling on. The first thing I'll be trying is GoToSocial.
If I decide that GTS is not for me for whatever reason, and want to run something else on the same domain (that is, with the same hostname in the account address, not a different subdomain!), is it *possible* to change to a different software under the same hostname?
(Note that I don't care if it's "a lot of work" or "pretty tricky" to make that happen; just if it's *possible*, or whether there is some sort of AP implementation detail that would cause federation to break no matter what I do.)
@joepie91 that's.a very good question, and I am looking forward to what you find out!
@jdp23 @joepie91 a WARNING is that once you turn on federation, it becomes increasingly dicey to turn it off
if you shut down your server for a long enough period of time, softwares might assume it is gone. then when you bring it back up, they might refuse to talk to it no matter what you do (to prevent domain hijacking). so it's probably best to keep what you have up and running until you have a tested replacement ready that you can swap in
@joepie91 @jdp23 activitypub is pretty resilient from a federation standpoint (in a way which probably leaves it open to domain hijacking as mentioned); usually the problems people run into are related to data loss on the server side (like, if you forget who all you are following or who follows you, there's no way to get that information back from the network).
i'd be a little worried about some servers caching information, like the location of your inbox, and not bothering to re-find it if you switch softwares and the location changes. but that's an implementation bug, not a protocol bug, and you could PROBABLY work around most things like that with a redirect from one to the other
@Lady @jdp23 Right, I intend to run this on a server and not move anything over until I'm happy with it, so availability won't be an issue - my only concern is that I don't want to "use up" the root domain if that means that I cannot run other software on it later :)