Convener: Anuj Ahooja (@quillmatic.com), Ryan Barrett (@snarfed.org)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• @scottjenson@social.coop
• Julian Fietkau (@julian@fietkau.social)
• Tom Brown (@tom@herestomwiththeweather.com)
• @johannab@<lots of spaces>, @johannab@cosocial.ca, @johannab@pxlfd.ca, @johannabee.bsky.social
• Sean Tilley (@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org)
• Seth Goldstein (@phillycodehound@indieweb.social)
• Michael Foster (@michael@newsmast.social)
• Tom Casavant (@tom@tomkahe.com)

Website: https://fed.brid.gy/

Notes

Bounce is doing some really cool stuff with migrating user accounts across different open protocols. It could provide a huge foundational piece for bigger and better things, like finding your friends from Facebook on Mastodon.

Fediverse Identity is a tough problem to solve. At the moment, the only concept we have for it involves Actors tethered to instances. If the instance goes down, you’re gone. But, even the process of initiating a migration is not very good. It’s messy, and clunky, and doesn’t always work between different platforms that try to support it.

One interesting perspective here: “Don’t host your identity on the same machine you’re sitting on.”

Nostr handles this incredibly well by making identities free-floating identities represented by keypairs on a network of relays.

Another headache: “Every server is hard-coded to use their own URI path structures.“

What’s really needed is for the ActivityPub protocol to be updated to really support the concept of identities at a high level, with support for platform-agnostic URI patterns. Unfortunately, we might not see that for a long time. One speaker conjectured we might not see anything like that until ActivityPub 2.0.

There are a couple of novel ways to approach identity signifiers within the Fediverse: implementing our own DID system, SCIDs from the W3C might be one, alsoKnownAs bundling, rel=me for other identities.

From Ryan Barrett: Credible exits are a an important part of the social experience. If you’re on an instance that you’re happy with, you don’t ever have to use migration to go somewhere else, but having the option to do so is naturally a good thing.

Bounce intends to support more protocols going forward. Here’s a list of them: https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22new%20protocol%22