digitalcourage.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
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We need to separate identity from servers in the ActivityPub world. It's time. I should be able to have a single identity and use it with lots of servers from Mastodon to Lemmy and beyond.

Then, various instances could reflect different communities with different people in them, different features and policies.

This also would elegantly solve the "instance selection paralysis" in @tchambers 's Deadly Fediverse UX sin #1.

Fortunately @benpate is starting to assemble people to solve this.

Hi @j12t @tchambers @benpate,
isn't without (hostnames and dns in essence) a and thus in disguise?

I mean DNS is the centralised infra we prbly can't do without anyway - why not stand on that shoulder and not add another global registry?

Moving may be done via redirects (like IRL).

I'd love to know more about what you're thinking here.

I don't think we're replacing #Webfinger. I think we're trying to follow through on #WhatCorySaid at #FediForum (youtube.com/watch?v=7_Gs1t0qe78)

...which is basically: Let regular people take their account to a new server any time they want, without relying on awful XML/CSV import/export jobs. This would go a long way to solving Fediverse UX issues and preventing enshitification.

Is there more that I've missed?

@mro @j12t @tchambers

Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻

Hi @benpate @j12t @tchambers,
oh, I see. I thought of near instant and frequent nomadic moves without a host-based identity. (Don't know why)

What do you think @pluralistic means with "their account" - all interactions ever? With or without a time machine at hand?

Ask a sci-fi author and get a solution based on time machines. grr.

Hi @benpate @j12t @tchambers,
frankly I'd keep expectations at bay and not promise a smoother UX than when e.g. moving from Tiktok to Instagram. Or from WhatsApp to Threema. How does that work?

Keeping subscribtions and notifying subscribers would indeed be neat and should warrant a FEP, however.

As a general rule, you’re absolutely correct. Keep expectations low, underpromise, overdeliver. And, there’s lots that’s out of my control, like how other servers will coordinate followers.

But I’m not just laying out a pie-in-the-sky wishlist. These are straight up business requirements for Bandwagon.fm that I’ve promised wagoneers that I’ll deliver.

And it’s not just “notifying subscribers” — it’s honoring PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS for music that fans have bought.

@mro @j12t @tchambers

Hi @benpate @j12t @tchambers,
ic. Paid subscription move sounds like an asset transfer. That's not moving curtains but vaults. You won't do that from akkoma to pixelfed but from paid service to paid service, will you? Who else but bandwagon is in that game? May GNU Taler help transferring value tokens? How shall the providers negotiate compensation? Similar to domain transfer (KK) maybe?

I don't know of anyone who's doing subscriptions on the Fediverse anymore. sub.club made a good run of it, but I believe they've stopped.

So, nobody, right now. But the ecosystem needs this, and I'm hoping that many others will join the party in the future :)

@mro @j12t @tchambers

Hi @benpate,
I prefer the sober, factual term 'subscriber' to the religious-sounding ‘follower’.

ah and another thing, I'd love to see subscriptions expire and be automatically renewed by the subscriber every 3 months or so. This way orphaned accounts would clean automatically and the burden of maintenance would be on the subscriber side, not the publisher.

Thank you! I'm checking this out this morning :)

@Sascha @mro @j12t @tchambers

@benpate btw what’s the user story you need for your own project?

Yes, I owe that on the Etherpad. But my guess is it’s pretty close to LOLA.

Having multiple IDs/URLs at one time is cool, but mostly I need to let people take their accounts with them to another server. Preferably with something simple like an OAuth handshake. And it needs to be 100% fidelity: purchases made on one server should be honored on the new one.

@j12t

So, I realize that I’m probably an edge case, and the rest of the Fediverse may not neeed true account portability right away, but I’m putting my foot in the gas because I reeeally neeeeed this to work

@mro @j12t @tchambers

Hi @benpate @j12t @tchambers,
what UX do you have in mind? Want to draft a FEP?

I was alarmed by 'host-agnostic identity', which IMO would mean a central registry - a no go in my eyes.

P.S.: in the fediverse we're all edge cases, isn't that the beauty?

@Ben Pate 🤘🏻 Let's just say the only devs who need full identity portability are silverpill and you, and silverpill is actively working on it.

Then there are Mike, Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsen who have full identity portability.

All the other devs don't seem to care.

As for the users, however... I guess if Mastodon 4.5 went fully nomadic on Forte's scale, people would kiss Gargron's feet because he'd deliver what they've been craving for for so long. For not exactly few of them, this would be what they've been wishing for for years plus cream and a cherry on top.

And if all the various *keys (at least those that are still maintained) went nomadic on a cross-server-type scale, that'd solve the problem with entire Forkeys going belly-up and leaving its users standing in the rain with unmaintained server software. I mean, I guess we all know how volatile Forkeys tend to be. Not only could people move around from server to server with ease and take everything with them, but they could also try out new Forkeys (this explicitly includes Iceshrimp.NET) and still have clones on longer-lived applications like Sharkey, CherryPick or good old Misskey itself as fallbacks.

In fact, I think one reason for Sharkey's popularity is its import/export capability.

CC: @Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻 @Johannes Ernst @Tim Chambers

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Misskey #Forkey #Forkeys #CherryPick #Sharkey #Iceshrimp #Iceshrimp.NET #NomadicIdentity
Indieweb.Social Tim Chambers (@tchambers@indieweb.social)61K Posts, 5.05K Following, 17.3K Followers · Technologist, writer, who is fascinated by how new politics impacts technology and vice versa. #fedi22 #indieweb #fediverse

Forgive me for being slow to get back to your #Long post.

I’ve skimmed the FEP (with more studies to come) and I doubt Mastodon et al will implement this. It seems like a breaking change that a big project just couldn’t undertake.

Also: I see the mechanism for splitting an identity and recovering if a server goes down, but how is profile data supposed to be synchronized between servers in the first place? How does it get distributed?

@jupiter_rowland

The first step is locking down basic vocabulary. Until then, everyone has their own interpretations.

I need to migrate EVERYTHING. Every piece of data, every setting, every interaction, every PURCHASE, and every membership subscription.

All transparently forwarded to the new location without the aid of the origin server owner, and simple enough that even the drummer in the band can do it.

(It’s cool.. I’m a drummer, so I’m not being percussio-phobic)

@mro @j12t @tchambers @pluralistic