this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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Thank you for your responses. It really makes me think about the meaning of portability:
Are you moving your identity? (e.g. implementing something like instance-agnostic user PGP keys)
Your data? The posts and comments you've contributed, which would only make sense with the context of the entire thread.
How would the contents of entire communities be migrated? I presume that's where the valuable content is for potential buyers either to drive ad traffic or train models.
Mastodon's export portability mostly focuses on the local social-graph aspects(follows, blocks, etc.) and while it has an archive function, people frequently lament losing their old posts and that graph relationship when they move.
Identity attestment is solvable in a legible fashion with any external mechanism that links back to report "yes, account at xyz.social is real", and this is already being done by some Mastodon users - it could be through a corporate web site, a self-hosted server or something going across a distributed system(IPFS, Tor, blockchains...) There are many ways to describe identity beyond that, though, and for example, provide a kind of landing page service like linktree to ease browsing different facets of identity or describe "following" in more than local terms.
I would consider these all high-effort problems to work on since a lot of it has to do with interfaces, UX and privacy tradeoffs. If we aim to archive everything then we have to make an omniscient distributed system, which besides presenting a scaling issue, conflicts with privacy and control over one's data - so that is probably not the goal. But asking everyone to just make a lot of backups, republish stuff by hand, and set up their own identity service is not right either.