how exactly do you "fix" that without making every post on the entire social network public

you need to know who to ask or your question will be heard by everyone

@ben
matrix makes messages and rooms independent of servers like this, and only shares messages to server where a member is in a chatroom

you can replace chatrooom with "user profile" and messages with "posts" and you'll have independent profiles without everything being public

@ben
and like yeah it's not a problem you personally encounter since you self-host your instance, but fedi instances do have the tendency to shut down outside of the biggest ones and oops your migration to another instance lost half your followers, deleted all of your posts, and broke all of the links to your posts

@charlotte @ben there do exist methods to "import" posts

but to say the least they are very janky, all it does is tell the server to recreate all the posts according to a backup file you got generated. it doesn't intrinsicly link itself to the actual original posts, and you can just trick the server into accepting fake posts that were made in 1973

it's a flaw of activitypub for a lot of people. i personally don't care if my post history gets nuked... though that said considering how activitypub works, your post history isn't actually nuked because it's cached everywhere so

@charlotte @ben i do wish you didn't lose most of your followers, but that'd require fedi admins to not go nuclear every 5 seconds, and that's not happening any time soon