I would love to see a universal account migration protocol for ActivityPub—not just between Mastodon instances, but across services. In other words, let users take their posts and followers with them—from Mastodon, say, to Pixelfed or Friendica, etc.

I’d feel more confident about investing time/money/energy on Mastodon if I knew I could always shift my social presence to the next Big Thing.

#fediverse #mastodon #activitypub #futureproof

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@matt

Well it's complicated by the nature of ActivityPub being so open to diversity of interfaces.

What happens when you go from a text-based interface to one that's 100% music posts, for example? We can't expect that different services will have compatible features.

@volkris That’s a fair point. What if there was provision in the spec for content types? I.e., define a “microblog” type, then allow migration from Mastodon to its successor?

@matt

Here you go.

ActivityPub references the ActivityStream types, and here's the list of predefined types, like Article, Audio, and Document.

AFAIK platforms are free to define their own custom types too.

w3.org/TR/activitystreams-voca

@volkris Dig it. And it looks like Mastodon has “first-class” support for the “Note” and “Question” types. So, maybe allow migration only to other platforms that support those types?

docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/act

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