A number of projects offer migration options within their own platform. Migrating seamlessly to different platforms is a bit harder but we’re starting to collect descriptions of various project dump files and build translators for some of the important ones. I suspect other projects are doing the same. The export ability ranges from CSV exports of your followers to syncing all your online identity data + content + files to multiple servers in near realtime.
Many thanks for these comments, @aschrijver, @weex & @macgirvin. It’s all useful, as a friend asked me to suggest a subject for a Rapido at Global Forum next March, and I suggested the Fediverse. However next year it’s in Oman so it’s no means certain that I’ll go.
Moreover, by the sounds of things the Fediverse is not ready for primetime yet. But if I or someone else would make such a presentation to such an audience (2019 participants pdf), I think it’d be along the lines of: “this is happening, here are the benefits, and here’s what’s needed to give it a boost”.
So what, I wonder, does the Fediverse need to give it that boost? Who is best placed to provide it, and how?
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I have asked that question too in the past, but I have since adopted a more nuanced perspective as to the answer I would give. Was Facebook ready for primetime in its early days? Or Twitter, Google Search, Github? The entire early web? When was the theshold crossed, and how much was luck involved and the unique circumstances that allowed that to happen? Why did some make it and so many others not?
And then consider “primetime”. What does it even mean? Ready for billions of people to adopt? Or readiness for production-use? If the latter, then fediverse has well reached that goal.
If you want to make a popular social networking application, then there’s nothing in ActivityPub et al that withholds you from doing so. Whether your app reaches its ambitious goals is probably more dependent on many other factors, such as user experience, productization, PR and marketing. Your app should be able to reach great heights while not even interoperating with other apps, and giving you full freedom to how you extend the protocol.
What is unique to ActivityPub and has never truly existed before, is that the standards offer social primitives that allow much broader interoperability between a wide variety of different apps. This is where the frontier of discovery is, and things are still very immature. But should you be a true early adopter of the broader vision and untapped potential of the federated social fabric that might possibly arise, then there’s good chance you be one of the players that is able to directly influence direction in desirable ways as well. Just like Mastodon is able to right now, in the microblogging space.
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I want to use my first post on this platform to reply from a different point of view / experience.
I’m sliding into the “60+ category”, reaching it in January. I’m part of some local communities of makers / politicians / teachers / musicians / admins.
All mentioned activities require meetings, shared docs and online collaboration, sometimes a new server (for dokuwiki, nextcloud, zammad…), e-mail, phone calls - no problem, so far. But it takes more and more time to maintain / replace / learn / test / release / backup all of it
Nobody here wants to hear or read a description of an app without having emotional relation to its purpose.
So the purpose, related to the needs of the community members, seems to be the central point to describe!
Some of Bob Dylan’s words at the Nobel Price ceremony some years ago: “Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried.”
Nobody is perfect, and digital communication unveils our flaws. I often feel like Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”: “As you from crimes would pardoned be / let your indulgence set me free.”
The web can help to ask myself more about the relation between honesty and depth. The web can help to set us free, one another.
I want to extend my experiences in the global community. I want to contribute and see how it helps (or how it fails).
I believe in free software, in collaborative work, starting on local givens and needs.
So I signed up here (as well as at wechange.de) to find some inspiration and try to communicate between the generations…
I do not see an ‘overpromise’. My adblocker is quiet. As aschrijver wrote, I like this early stage and ‘buy’ it as a plus!
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Welcome @HPL and thank you for adding to what is a central issue for interface with Fedi systems with those who haven’t yet tried these things.
In relation to starting on local givens and needs, I find this idea to be particularly beautiful as a techie who can easily come up with lots of things to fix from my own point of view. Several months ago I started a fork of Mastodon and immediately entered in as many issues as I could think of. Today I’m happy to say that others have reported their own issues and it’s on those issues that we as a community more-generally focus. I really like community needs bubbling up and those being the driving force for further development.
In this sense I feel that forks are very healthy as they provide many venues for differentiation for each community, letting them test out what they want to do, and if something works it can easily be spliced into other forks and deployed to many different instances.