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Comment by moojd | Hacker News Reader

Even framing it as 'account portability' is missing the point. I want to own my identity and take it with me anywhere. I shouldn't need to transfer anything, its mine. This model is fundamentally incompatible with how ActivityPub works (no, running your own server is not the same thing as decoupling identity from the concept of a server itself.) Could that change in the future? Maybe, but not without prior art. Even if you think @proto, farcaster, ssb, nostr, or others are doomed, we should be applauding them for attempting to push the needle forward.

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It's not incompatible with how ActivityPub works at all.

The ActivityPub spec says that object id's should be https URI's, not that they must. The underlying ActivityStreams spec just requires them to be unique.

All that's needed to provide full portability without a "transfer" is for an implementation to use URI's to e.g. DID's, or any other distributed URI scheme. Optionally, if you want full backwards compatibility, point the id to a proxy and add a separate URI until there's broader buyin.

I think there's be benefit in updating the ActivityPub spec to be less demanding of URIs, and instead of saying that they "should" be https require them to be a secure transport, and maybe provide a fallback mechanism if the specific URI mechanism is not known (e.g. allow implementations to provide a fallback proxy URL), but the main challenge there is not the spec but getting buying from at least Mastodon. The approach of providing a https URI but give a transport-neutral id separate to the origin https URI would on the other hand degrade gracefully in the absence of buyin.

> the main challenge there is not the spec but getting buying from at least Mastodon

Which is why promoting a new competing and incompatible protocol is a good way to push for change.

You want Microsoft to become more open? Then start promoting a pure FLOSS alternative until they can't ignore it anymore.

You could do the same a lot easier by pushing an incompatible change to ActivityPub that'd be easy to adopt.

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