Once you've deleted a channel, nobody, not even yourself, can ever create a channel with this name on this hub ever again.
This ability is a weakness of nomadic identity.
I did see your posts about implementing the revoking and issuing of keys from posts that are a couple years old... i have not seen any follow up on those ideas. Is there a reason for not having this implemented..?
One would think though that if you are at a level of installing a new hub on your own server, that you would be confident enough in knowing what the process is all about.
There are several public hubs that anyone's grandma could sign up for.
You don't have to run your own hub to use Hubzilla.
That is true, however key management should be left to the admin, and not to the regular user.
Right now there is no way for an admin to change the server keys and not mess things up for existing channel names.
One would think though that if you are at a level of installing a new hub on your own server, that you would be confident enough in knowing what the process is all about
Forcing people who are not tech savvy to do things they don't understand is a recipe for disaster.
This is a major weakness for future exploitation by bad and/or incompetent actors with access to a web server.
Right now there is no way for an admin to change the server keys and not mess things up for existing channel names. Same applies for the user, except it would just mess up their channel.
but Hubzilla is capable.
I think before doing it, you should go offline with your old server, and only when things are done, you should go online with the new server.
One big side-effect of blocking used identities is that every botched clone leaves scorched earth behind. Whenever a cloning process was mostly unsuccessful, but still actually created a (useless) clone, not only can't you create a new clone with the same name, but you can't clone the same channel onto that hub anymore, not even under a new shortname. If the issue is on the side of your main instance, and you don't know, you burn through hubs, and you may end up with nowhere to clone.
The idea is rather to create a whole new channel with a whole new set of connections, just with the same name.
For systems that handle keys, such as Hubzilla, it should be handled as a different identity.
Systems that don't use keys would probably assume they are the same channel though, because they only use the handle as the identifier.
What do we do about the other identity that shares the handle? Existing connections, posts, comments, etc?
Which is pretty much the definition of impersonation in this space.
especially when users try to log on from different devices.
Will not work, guid prevents this behaviour.
Technically it's possible to do anything with mucking about in the database. That doesn't necessarily make it a good idea :)One problem I can think of is that other sites may not be willing to accept or send activities from/to a connection if it has changed it's public key. To fix this, you would (at least currently) also have to muck about in the databases of the remote sites as well.
There would need to be a change in how identity is handled if we want to allow the reuse of channel addresses.
