@
InnocentZero FEP-ef61 all by itself isn't a magical solution.
It's just one element in implementing full-blown nomadic identity (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity) via ActivityPub, but it's far from being the only one.See,
nomadic identity wasn't invented just a few years ago or so, and it wasn't invented for, on and with ActivityPub either. It was first introduced in Fediverse software that works vastly,
vastly different from Mastodon and from most of the rest of the Fediverse. I'm daily-driving what became of this software.
The beginning of nomadic identity: the Zot protocol, Red and Hubzilla
Nomadic identity was invented in 2011 by @
Mike Macgirvin who had made Friendica (
https://friendi.ca,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendica,
https://joinfediverse.wiki/Friendica) as early as 2010. (Friendica is the oldest still existing Fediverse software, by the way.)
To put this into perspective: The concept of nomadic identity is over four years older than Mastodon. And it predates the first ActivityPub implementation by some six years. (Ironically, the software that first implemented ActivityPub is essentially the same software that first implemented nomadic identity.)
One issue that plagued Friendica is an issue that plagues everything decentralised: Servers shut down out of the blue, and users lose everything. That's why Mike had the idea to make identities not only portable (as in, easy to move from one server to another), but
nomadic (as in, absolutely identical clones of the same identity exist on multiple independent servers at the same time, so if one server shuts down, you lose nothing).
Still
in 2011, Mike designed a wholly new federated protocol named Zot to implement nomadic identity. Mind you, he had already designed a brand-new protocol from scratch for Friendica.
In 2012, Mike took his own Red, a development-grade fork of his own official development fork of Friendica. He pretty much ripped the whole backend out and also most of the frontend, and
he basically developed an entirely new server application, now built against Zot. This was necessary because Red would have to handle identities completely differently from Friendica in order to make them nomadic.
See, Friendica handles identities just like Mastodon and almost the entire rest of the Fediverse: Your identity is your account, your login. You have one identity per login, you have one identity per server. All your data, all your stuff is stored directly in your account.
But you can't clone accounts. It's way too tedious to separate the stuff that must be cloned (contacts, messages, settings etc.) from the stuff that mustn't be cloned (login credentials).So Mike created the concept of "channels" (https://joinfediverse.wiki/Channels_(Hubzilla_%26_(streams))). They're basically containers for your identity that contain everything except the login credentials on the servers. They can easily be cloned and moved as a whole.
Red still exists in a way: Later the same year, it was renamed the Red Matrix. And in 2015, it was completely refactored, it was greatly expanded in features and functionality, and it was renamed Hubzilla (
https://hubzilla.org,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubzilla,
https://joinfediverse.wiki/Hubzilla). Hubzilla is where I'm commenting from right now, and this channel has been cloned for longer than most Mastodon users have known that Mastodon exists.
Nomadic identity via only ActivityPub: (streams), Mitra and forte
FEP-ef61 was created by @
silverpill, developer of Mitra (
https://codeberg.org/silverpill/mitra) in 2023. The goal was to take non-nomadic, account-equals-identity Mitra and make it every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla. Not by rewriting the entire backend against Zot (or its newest version known as Nomad) and then bolting ActivityPub support back on, but by using nothing but ActivityPub itself without rewriting the backend.
Development and sparrings partner became Mike Macgirvin himself who, at that time, was working on the streams repository (
https://joinfediverse.wiki/(streams),
https://codeberg.org/streams/streams), a Nomad-based fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, somewhat slimmed down in features (it isn't a full-blown, jack-of-all-trades CMS unlike Hubzilla), but every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla.
The two worked out a way of using ActivityPub and only ActivityPub to establish nomadic identity. Not only to made Fediverse identifiers independent from servers, but to actually use ActivityPub to clone identities with everything attached to them between servers.
Eventually, FEP-ef61 was defined, and (streams) and Mitra became the first Fediverse server applications to
understand portable identities as per FEP-ef61. (streams) was the first
nomadic Fediverse server application to understand them, but it still uses its native Nomad protocol for its own nomadicity. Mitra, all by itself, still isn't nomadic to this day; it uses a client named Minimitra for nomadicity.
The first Fediverse server application that actually uses only ActivityPub for nomadicity, all the way to cloning and syncing channels, is Forte (
https://codeberg.org/fortified/forte). It came to exist in mid-August 2024, essentially as a byproduct of an accident. (streams) had to juggle so many identities already, ActivityPub identities, Nomad identities, Zot6 identities, that when FEP-ef61 was merged into its release branch, it confused all these identities and didn't connect or federate with anything anymore. In order to find and fix the issue, Mike Macgirvin himself forked his own streams repository and ripped out any and all support for protocols that weren't ActivityPub. This required Forte to use ActivityPub for everything that (streams) used Nomad for.
Where we are now
So as of now,
there are exactly three still existing server applications with full-blown server-side clone/sync/move-entire-identities-without-leaving-dead-accounts-behind nomadicity: Zot-based Hubzilla from 2012/2015, Nomad-based (streams) from 2021 and ActivityPub-based Forte from 2024.
There is only one of this kind that uses ActivityPub for everything, including nomadicity, and that's Forte.Forte is the youngest member of the same software family as Hubzilla and (streams). They were all created by the same developer, and they were all born nomadic.
There is no case of a typical, classic, non-nomadic, account-equals-identity, ActivityPub-based Fediverse server application that was successfully converted to full-blown server-side clone/sync/move-entire-identities-without-leaving-dead-accounts-behind nomadicity. Forte itself wasn't converted from non-nomadic to nomadic; it was converted from Nomad-based to ActivityPub-based while having a nomadic legacy that dated back a dozen years at that point.
I'm not saying that it's impossible to turn non-nomadic software into fully nomadic software. But it's a huge undertaking that
will require rewriting large parts of the server backend.
Essentially:
You can't just add FEP-ef61 support to Mastodon and immediately clone your account over to other servers the same way that I can clone my Hubzilla channel.CC: @
Rob Ricci @
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