@Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻 Not to my knowledge.

First of all, nomadic identity won't be described in one single FEP that'll cover everything. It was not created on and for ActivityPub. In fact, the concept predates ActivityPub by some six years, and the first implementation predates ActivityPub by some five years.

See, nomadic identity started as an idea. Then Mike built a brand-new protocol around that idea, Zot. Then, in 2012, Mike forked one of his own forks of his own software that is now known as Friendica, originally based on yet protocol designed by himself, and re-wrote the whole thing against Zot. That's how the software was born that's known as Hubzilla now.

As for nomadic identity via ActivityPub, there is only one publicly available software implementation for that. And that's Mike's own Forte. Forte still does everything the Hubzilla/(streams) way which is very very different from how anything else in the Fediverse works, even including Friendica itself, and especially including Mastodon.

Whereas Zot was designed around nomadic identity, ActivityPub isn't. It's having nomadic identity bolted on with a whole slew of FEPs authored by @silverpill who is working on converting Mitra (typical Fediverse software: built only against ActivityPub, non-nomadic, login/account equals identity) into something that's every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte.

Nomadic identity via ActivityPub was originally silverpill's idea, by the way. And that was in 2023. It turned out that this was actually doable, and so he and Mike started working on it, using experimental "nomadic" branches of Mitra and the streams repository respectively. Their approaches were naturally different: silverpill had to make something non-nomadic nomadic. Mike had to make something nomadic be nomadic using a protocol that wasn't made for nomadic identity.

Not only is silverpill's approach much more difficult because Mitra wasn't made for nomadic identity either, but he also took it upon himself to put everything into FEPs by and by. He is still publishing FEP after FEP. Nomadic identity is quite a complex thing from a "Fediverse equals ActivityPub" point of view; it's just that the Hubzilla/(streams) bubble is so used to it whereas silverpill actually has to explore and research something that's natural to Mike.

There's no common set of commands either. There can't be any. Forte, like everything else in the family all the way back to Friendica, is written in PHP. Mitra is written in Rust. Nobody has ever attempted to make something not written in PHP nomadic.

In fact, code sharing would be next to impossible anyway: Forte, like Hubzilla and early Mistpark/Friendika, is published under the MIT license, (streams) is in the public domain, but Mitra is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL v3. Any code coming out of Mitra's conversion to nomadicity would be AGPL-licensed Rust code. And MIT-licensed PHP code that was created when turning Nomad-based (streams) into ActivityPub-based, Nomad-less Forte would be useless for non-nomadic-to-nomadic conversions anyway.

So don't expect any how-to's or the like for converting non-nomadic, ActivityPub-only-by-original-design, login/account-equals-identity Fediverse server software to the same level of nomadicity as Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte until

• the first stable release of Mitra with full support for that level of nomadicity is officially rolled out
• silverpill declares that everything necessary for Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte-level nomadic identity via nothing but ActivityPub is cast into FEPs and finalised

Seeing as this has been in the making for some two years now, and I don't even know if the experimental nomadic branch of Mitra even allows cloning right now, I guess this will be a long way to go. He may actually first have to change Mitra from the standard Fediverse model of the account and the login being the identity to Hubzilla's, (streams)' and Forte's model of the identity being a container inside your account and one account being able to host multiple such identities. That's because you can't clone logins.

Oh, by the way, nomadic identity is not just about moving. It's not "moving-your-Mastodon-account-to-another-instance on coke". It's way more.

The core feature is cloning. Imagine you have full, live, hot backups of your Mastodon account on one, two, three, four or more other Mastodon instances. Imagine they all have the same identity, based on which one of them is your main instance. Imagine whatever happens on one of them is sync'd to the others in near-real-time. Imagine you can log into either of them and use either of them all the same, regardless of how many and which of the servers are actually online, as long as at least one is.

Moving is actually even more complex than cloning because it involves both cloning and changing the main instance of your identity.

Allow me to illustrate by supposing Mastodon works like Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte:

• Situation:
  
  • You have an account on digitalcourage.social with one channel, [email protected].
  • You want to move to troet.cafe.
• Step 1: You create an account on troet.cafe.
• Step 2: There can't be accounts with no channels. You have to add a channel.
  So you choose to move your channel [email protected] from digitalcourage.social to troet.cafe.
• Step 3: Your channel [email protected] is cloned over to troet.cafe.
• Situation now:
  
  • You have an account on digitalcourage.social with the main instance of your channel; its identity is [email protected].
  • You have an account on troet.cafe with a clone of your channel; its identity is still [email protected].
• Step 4: All data on your channel is synchronised over from your main instance on digitalcourage.social to your clone on troet.cafe. Posts, images, other files, followers, followed, settings, lists, filters etc. etc. pp. Everything.
• Now the main instance and the clone are identical.
  Up until here, the process of moving is the same as the process of cloning. What follow is exclusive to moving.
• Step 5:
  
  • The clone on troet.cafe is promoted to main instance.
  • As there can be only one main instance for each channel, the former main instance on digitalcourage.social is demoted to clone.
• Situation now:
  
  • You have an account on digitalcourage.social with a clone of your channel, formerly the main instance; its identity is [email protected].
  • You have an account on troet.cafe with the main instance of your channel, formerly a clone; its identity is [email protected].
• Step 6: All your connections on servers of nomadic software are changed from [email protected] to [email protected], both locally on the servers that you are on and locally on the servers that they are on.
• Step 7 (AFAIK, this only happens on (streams) and Forte in reality): All your outbound connections ("followed") on servers running non-nomadic software receive a follow request from [email protected] which, to them, is an all-new, independent identity.
• The actually move is done. What follows is the clean-up that really makes the move a move, namely taking care that nothing is left behind in the old location.
• Step 8: When these last steps are finalised, your clone on digitalcourage.social is deleted. After all, you wanted to move, not to clone.
• Step 9: As your account on digitalcourage.social has no channel on it anymore, the whole account is deleted.

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