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FediForum April 2026

FediProfile/BadgeFed: Office Hours

Topics Identity & accounts Protocols & standards

Convener: Maho Pacheco (@maho@hub.vocalcat.com)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

Website: https://hub.vocalcat.com/

Notes

Feature requests

  • Export a profile and import it in another instance

  • Selectable boosting and visibility are great! Hoping for more services that could receive boosts

    • Currently I’ve validated support for Mastodon and GotoSocial, static websites, Ghost, Pixelfed, PeerTube (latest version)

    • Like what services? I guess I mean things that cross the protocols. Bridgy Fed, and maybe the answer is “just boost to the Bridgy-connected account” and that works. But is there a way that I could post to LinkedIn? GoBo.social was showing this off last year but they shut down.

    • Possibly unpopular thought: Let people auth, but not otherwise interact, with FB, ATProto, Google, etc credentials.

Random thoughts (governance, promotion, trust&safety, etc)

  • Question: what are and how is FediProfile addressing any abuse vectors? I like that I don’t see any! But that’s also a signal that there might be some I don’t see.

    • Ah, i think something of an answer came up - need to control the boosting and notifications carefully.

  • I’m very keen on this because a self-hosted FediProfile service looks like it has potential to be a shortcut to onboarding a geo-local service that is harder to gather people into. I had the “but grandma!” argument (again) yesterday and there is a point to be made - our vast variety and flexibility of platforms is an access barrier.

  • Scenario of interest:

    • Social infrastructure/community/organizational planners would like to gather their purposeful community and get them off Meta, X, Discord, etc and into self-governed digital space

    • Participants need a safe and accessible bridge to make the transition. This is a social concept, not a technical barrier

  • Could an aspiring civic technology integrator, rather than trying to “pick one” of our many wonderful platforms and “sell” everyone on it, …

    • Start with Profiles and Badges

    • Foster the consent and participation model (accept badges! Create a Profile!)

    • Members follow other members based on the Badge credentials, from whereever they already meet

    • The “community” then has impetus to gravitate towards collaboration first … moving to new platform next

  • Thoughts?