Reconciling different roots of identity

[trwnh]

In practice we already see discrepancy between Move activities in, say, Mastodon vs. Mitra. Mastodon has the old account send the Move, verified by implicit authority and alsoKnownAs on the new account pointing back to the old account. Mitra wants the new account to send the Move, verified by a signed statement from the same key as the old account.

@silverpill

My general plan is to use Move() activity for account migrations, but let people sign this activity with their own key. If I understand correctly, implementation of Move() in Mastodon requires a cooperating server. If your old server is offline or if admin banned you, there’s no way to move your followers. But if user-signed activities are allowed, you can simply register new account on another server, import your follower list and send them a command to un-follow your old account and follow your new account.

@silverpill

Here’s an example of Move activity:

{
  "@context": [
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
  ],
  "actor": "https://server2.com/users/alice",
  "id": "https://server2.com/activities/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001",
  "object": "https://server1.com/users/alice",
  "target": "https://server2.com/users/alice",
  "to": [
    "https://example.com/users/bob"
  ],
  "type": "Move"
}

• object is the old account
• target is the new account (which initiates the migration)