Reader mailbag #2 - my first poll, and I missed a bunch of Fediverse tools for Exit

Welcome to December! As an early holiday gift, I’m putting you in control of what I write next. Please take a moment to respond to this poll with what you most want to read from me over the next two weeks before the winter break.

My last post on real-world Exit and interoperability solutions got a good response on social media. On Bluesky, the knowledgeable and astute Liaizon Wakest took the time to point out that the Fediverse has more support for Exit than I gave it credit for. They kindly pointed out several existing projects and proposals.

I got it basically right last time that on the Fediverse, your identity and stuff (follows, followers, posts, etc) lives on the server you choose to be a part of. This is different from Bluesky, where your identity and stuff lives on a portable PDS (Personal Data Server) that can be looked up via a DID (decentralized identifier) stored on the PLC (Public Ledger of Credentials).

What I missed is the Move activity supported by many of the big Fediverse platforms including Mastodon, GoToSocial, and PixelFed, which makes your followers highly portable.

If you switch between Fediverse servers that support Move, all of your followers on the old server will get a notification that you’ve moved, and will automatically shift to following you at your new home. Plus, the old server keeps a redirect notice on hand, so if someone goes looking for you there, they’ll be pointed to where you’ve gone.

This is the kind of basic courtesy that used to define the Internet. If every social platform were required to support something like Fediverse Move, it would be a powerful constraint on their worst impulses. If Elon Musk had known back in 2022 that every dissatisfied Twitter user could simply Move to Threads or Bluesky and take all their followers with them, he might have been more cautious about blowing up the platform. [Well, it’s Elon, so maybe not, but at least it would have made it easier for people to start over on a new platform.]

Fediverse Move does have its limits. First, it’s dependent on the old server, so if you relocated because it shut down entirely, you’ll lose your followers, and if it goes down in future, the redirect stops working. Second, it only moves followers. If you want to move the list of who you follow, or deal with your content, you need to run a separate export/import. Most of the time, your old posts, images, and videos end up left behind.

A new tool built by GoToSocial called Slurp improves content migration significantly. The tool reads Mastodon or PixelFed exports, and uses API calls to add the content to GoToSocial back-dated to when it was originally posted, and without spamming your feed with all the reposts. Here’s a good post explaining it in more detail.

In theory, Slurp could be extended to work with any combination of Fediverse servers that support the right export files and import APIs. I would love to see this extended to take in other exports, like from Threads, Bluesky, X, Instagram, etc. That would go a long way to making big tech’s fig-leaf portability (export with no import) meaningful.

Move and Slurp are helpful, but will the Fediverse ever go a step further and build a truly portable identity that decouples who you are from what server you happen to be on?

Enter FEP-ef61: Portable Objects, a Fediverse Enhancement Protocol by silverpill. This FEP brings DIDs into the Fediverse.

I spent several hours reading this FEP and its comments, and came away absolutely convinced of one critical fact. I do not (yet) have the expertise to explain how this would work in any meaningful detail. The DID and ActivityPub rabbit holes go deeper than my brain can handle right now.

The one big difference worth understanding is centralized vs decentralized discovery. As I mentioned above, Bluesky depends on a big directory (the PLC). Mobile phone number portability also depends on a directory called NPAC. From what I can make out, this FEP makes each person’s identity more free-standing, based on a principle of online discovery called follow your nose. You get a link to someone’s identity, which contains records about where that user is based, no central authority required.

This might sounds a bit chaotic to someone used to massive social media platforms, but it’s actually pretty normal. There’s no central directory of email addresses or cell phone numbers, but we manage to assemble our personal address books nonetheless.

As an extra bonus, since a person on the Fediverse is just another type of object, this would work for every post and file as well, which would help fight off link rot or the risk of a whole server going down and taking all its content with it.

Another plus is that unlike the Fediverse DID proposal (did:fedi) I mentioned last week, the Portable Objects FEP looks like it has a few projects working to implement it. I was especially excited by an early stage effort by Mike Kasprzak to convert the BlueSky-style PDS to support both ATproto and ActivityPub.

This is closer to my personal holy grail of Exit and interoperability – one consistent identity and home for your content. Instead of needing to worry about technical issues around how to move between platforms, or whether two different platforms even talk to each other, you should own your own identity, community, and ideas, and have the freedom to focus on who you want to communicate with, and what you want to say.

Taking back ownership of our online lives would be a huge step toward freeing ourselves from the Platformocracy and securing the representation and accountability we deserve.

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].