This basically sends messages to your followers instructing them to follow your new account instead. This is all transparent to both you and your followers.
I just don't understand why people feel such a strong desire to cling to the federated servers model when these problems are solved in decentralized protocols already...
which ones are you thinking of?
As for your final remark, I really can't see a good way to handle such a situation at all. And I've never heard about any protocol that can handle it. What protocol are you talking about?
Any social tools built on top of a decentralized database would do it.
- https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db (3Box)
- https://github.com/amark/gun (Iris)
- https://handbook.scuttlebutt.nz/ (Manyverse, Planetary)