Re: Let's turn aspiration into fact?

> If you wanted to leave one platform for another, you  could bring all your content, all your followers, all your everything 
with you.

We already have this capability with Hubzilla via the Zot protocol, and 
Streams via the Nomad protocol. If ActivityPub could adopt these 
features, it would bring this feature set to more people.

The way Zot and Nomad protocols handle it would be a good model to start 
from. We've been using it for over a decade now, before ActivityPub even 
existed. It may not be popular because it was never promoted properly 
nor well-documented, but it is tried and tested. (And now that we formed 
the Hubzilla Association and I was elected its President, we are going 
to make sure our unique feature set is documented and promoted properly.)

If you were to implement a similar feature set, some things that would 
be necessary include:

1. Portable or Nomadic Identities would need to be based on 
cryptographic keys, not a URL or channel address (someone@example.com). 
That way the identity can be recognized as the same person or channel 
even though it moved servers.

2. Ideally, there is a common export and import format that can be used 
for multiple platforms. You could export your identity and data from one 
platform and move it to another by downloading a file from your existing 
server and then uploading it to the new server.

3. If you want to get fancy, you could do a sync between accounts so 
there is no download required. You authenticate on both platforms, and 
issue a "sync" command to either migrate or make a clone of your account.

4. If you really want to get fancy, you would implement "nomadic 
identity" in addition to "portable identity." They are similar, but the 
key difference is that with nomadic identity, your identity can exist on 
more than one server at a time, whereas a portable identity is for 
migrating from one server to another.

Both the Zot protocol and the Nomad protocol have already implemented 
all four of the above.

Ideally this functionality is part of ActivityPub and the different 
platforms get to decide if they make that functionality available to 
their users.

I know that with Hubzilla, we are redesigning our website, 
documentation, and user interface to promote nomadic identity and 
federated single sign on. And we plan on using this as a reason to 
choose Hubzilla over ActivityPub-based platforms.

Your identity is already portable and nomadic on our platform. Hopefully 
we can get the rest of the fediverse onboard with the concepts of 
nomadic identity and federated single sign on.

Any way that I can help, I am here.

Scott M. Stolz
President, Hubzilla Association
Director, Federated Works
Founder & Manager, WisTex TechSero Ltd. Co.

On 2/7/2024 1:15 PM, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> I can get behind that aspiration.  I think there are important use 
> cases to verifiably bring one's social history along in a move, and 
> that users moving among servers is rather key to ActivityPub's 
> moderation architecture working well. Server administrators won't feel 
> empowered to defederate servers with policies they can't accept, if  
> many well-connected well-behaved users are stuck on that server.
>
> To make proposals more concrete, we could write some proposed 
> requirements first,  identify the key use cases -- if there is energy 
> to do that, otherwise wait and focus first on the existing stuff, right?
>
> Lisa
>
> On Wed, Feb 7, 2024 at 9:56 AM Johannes Ernst 
> <johannes.ernst@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>     According to David Pierce at The Verge in a piece
>     <https://www.theverge.com/24063290/fediverse-explained-activitypub-social-media-open-protocol> published
>     today, the Fediverse is:
>
>>     … an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open
>>     protocol called ActivityPub, which allows you to port your
>>     content, data, and follower graph between networks.
>
>     He continues:
>
>>     If you wanted to leave one platform for another, you could bring
>>     all your content, all your followers, all your everything with you.
>
>     This is aspirational compared to the state of implementation
>     today, but a very reasonable aspiration IMHO. I would be prepared
>     to argue that this aspiration — and a few other bit and pieces he
>     isn’t mentioning — are essential to become real in order to
>     deliver on the promise that people already think we are making.
>     (Anecdotally I have found that many people believe this, not just
>     David)
>
>     What are our aspirations in SWICG here, specifically with respect
>     to future standards work?
>
>     It’s very important that we document what works today, I
>     appreciate the people who are stepping up right now, and don’t
>     want to distract from that.
>
>     But once we have captured the present, where are we going? As a
>     straw proposal, I propose that we adopt the two above sentences
>     from today’s Verge piece as a vision, e.g. as “We develop the
>     standards (and whatever else is necessary) that make easily
>     possible … (see above)”.
>
>     1. Does this vision sound reasonable to you?
>     2. How can this very straw-y proposal be improved?
>
>     P.S. Yes, I understand that we won’t (want to) squeeze Lemmy into
>     Mastodon. So add the qualifier: within reason or such.
>
>     Cheers,
>
>
>
>
>     Johannes.
>
>     Johannes Ernst
>
>     Fediforum <https://fediforum.org/>
>     Dazzle Labs <https://dazzlelabs.net/>
>
>
>