Re: Portability work tempo

On 2/20/2024 4:24 PM, Lisa Dusseault wrote:
>
> I'd love to get a good tempo or feedback loop going on fediverse
> portability work.  My early questions are:
>
> * who is interested in a standardized activity-pub-compatible export
> format?   What are the use cases?

In Sevilla, I offered to get this ball rolling with a list of the
user-stories I saw people discussing across Social Hub threads, FEPs,
and matrix conversations.  Apologies again for the number of months
between the promise and the rough draft. I think I already shared them
on list, but here they are again, to save people the effort of reviewing
all the relevant FEPs and mega-threads on socialhub:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/73cd/fep-73cd.md#migration-user-stories

I would love them to be improved, split, replaced, and whatever else is
necessary for them to be useful to this discussion. The assumption was
that some of these won't be in scope in the short term or for the CG TF,
but at least documented to aid discovery/later coordination (it helps to
have the URL of an "issue" to point to when someone asks you about
something you are NOT working on):

> * To what extent can activity pub itself be used by a destination
> server to fetch a user’s content from their original server? What
> information would be missing?  (for one, I think the user’s list of
> accounts they follow)

AFAIK this is a pretty accurate explanation of status quo:
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/7628/fep-7628.md#history

Also useful as a starting point/level-set is Erin Kissane's list of
Mastodon-specific painpoints which is hopefully at least a little
out-of-date by now.  Perhaps someone following Mastodon more closely
could link to changelogs if so:
https://erinkissane.com/notes-from-a-mastodon-migration

As she notes, the calckey/firefish/icefish family of friendly misskey
forks (which represents a huge chunk of the Fediverse) DOES export
follow-lists, but only other firefish/calckey servers can import them
and I don't see a FEP anywhere so I think that might be more of an
"experimental feature" than an export format. People familiar with the
codebase can chime in if I'm off base and just bad at googling.

> * What are the requirements or use cases for portability of
> **moderation** information?
I defer to specialists here, but I've heard people discuss per-user,
per-object/activity, and per-server moderation records as three
drastically different problem-spaces, so perhaps it's worth breaking
user stories about moderation records out into three distinct user
stories, as overlapping constituencies care about all three and have
different urgencies to solving them.

IMHO per-user or per-object records are downstream of stable
identification of migratable users and objects. To put it another way, I
got stalled out thinking about this and punted until after there is some
baseline regularity to the transformation of `id` properties across a
move (Evan referred to this in his response on this same thread). My
dayjob has me instinctually reaching for some form of
content-addressing, but there are definitely downsides to paths and
identifiers being completely uniform across implementations (even if the
transformation between `id`s becomes trivial in such a top-down
solution). <disappears down a dayjob rabbit hole muttering to himself>.
>
>  If folks are interested in joining a call I've got a couple busy
> weeks but then March 14 at 8am PST is looking good so I've blocked it
> off. We could do something monthly not too close to the general group
> meetings?  LMK.
>
> Lisa

Received on Wednesday, 21 February 2024 17:20:19 UTC