Convener: Johannes Ernst (https://j12t.org, @j12t@12t.social, @j12t.org)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• David Rowley
• Chris (@sturmsucht@mastodon.social)
• Chad Kohalyk (@chadkoh@indieweb.social)
• Jesse Karmani (@jesseplusplus@mastodon.social)
• Ben Pate (@benpate@mastodon.social)
• Georgia Mountford-Blake (@georgiagemo@mastodon.social)
• Jayne Samuel-Walker
• Kirsten Lambertsen (@mizkirsten@mastodon.social)
• Matthias Pfefferle (@pfefferle@mastodon.social)
• Travis F Well (@travisfw@fosstodon.org)

Difficulties?

• How would one migrate a Mastodon account to a Pixelfed account?

Ideas:

• “Offsite backup streaming”
• OpenID Single Sign On that lets me interact on other sites with my own identity.

Use cases:

• I want to pack up and leave, vs
• I don’t want to make yet another account, just let me log in with my existing account from e.g., MastodonHave an identity separate from a server.

Portability:

• Identity - move to another service, change handle, change domains
• Posts / Content
  • Engagements with this?
• Social graph - Followers / following remain
• Even changing domain breaks everything right now

Phone number portability analogy

• But only number ports, not e.g., voicemail box messages

How to move your personal data OUT is easy, or doable. But moving data IN is still not available, not possible, not offered.

Have an identity that is separate from an instance. Not like Nostr.

• homogeneous transfers vs heterogeneous transfers:

  • going to and from different instances of the same software (e.g. Mastodon instances) vs
  • going to and from instances of different software (e.g. Mastodon going to Bluesky)

• And with or without the cooperation of server mods

  • ideal to be able to get things out regardless of mod hostility

Not like Nostr.

“Trusted Computing”, … binding policy to the key of the data … To resolve the challenge of knowing the origin of the data.

Analogy is to say blockchain and data instead of blockchain and money.

“Need to know we can all share state at same time across multiple machines”

Johannes would like his own identity (like his own domain)

• use this to log into Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. and post from that account to those servers

Everyone implementing the MOVE activity at the very LEAST, could be a big selling factor of fediverse software

Chad: Could anyone recommend a Mastodon backup tool that would allow me to download all of my posts, boosts, with interactions… and upload them to my own site as static HTML? A bunch of these tools came out for Twitter after the acquisition. Kinda like pointing my identity to my own domain, I would like to point to my own domain for my archives

Ben Pate has volunteered to take a working group to the next step.

Kirsten expressed desire to see a fucinplan come out of the working group before addressing tech details.