Alright it's late and i need to go to bed, but here's a draft FEP to do full account migration with posts and whatever other kinda objects you want to bring with you.

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

> you cannot assume

@trwnh but I can. :D At least in GoActivityPub I built some logic around composing IRIs using this kind of mechanism.

It's not guaranteed for handling external objects, but it's useful for creating internal ones.

And in the context of moving objects (which is what I was replying to initially), I feel like having a example.com/~jdoe namespace ensures that you can do a batch move (and not have collisions) for all objects that have them as author just by changing the relevant bits of the object IDs, instead of having to generate a new ID individually for each moved object.

@kopper @jonny

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@mariusor well, internally you control the identifiers, so you can do whatever you want. the danger is in assuming meaning externally.

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@julian @jonny SocialHub is not a bad place though - FEP category is federated

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ap/object/bee813d28b0947ffce97f8c2bbebb955

[julian@activitypub.space]

Of course, not trying to say otherwise. Just that there is a preconception that jonny@neuromatch.social had to post there as part of the FEP process, which even I was under the assumption of.

We chatted about that and you disabused me of that notion :smirk:

[julian@activitypub.space]

jonny@neuromatch.social kopper@not-brain.d.on-t.work Perhaps Capability Discovery is what you might be looking for? There is some implementor support for this one.

[elduvelle@neuromatch.social]

@jonny you're amazing 😍

[rimu@piefed.social]

This looks fine to me, great to see many edge cases considered.

[gatesvp@mstdn.ca]

@jonny I'm seeing notes here for the technical challenge of performing a migration of objects between two willing hosts given a user in good standing with sufficient credentials. I think it's great that you have written that down.

But I think the reason we don't have this yet is because that's only 20% of the problem. The other 80% of the challenge is contained in that first sentence of mine.

• How do we signal this intention to migrate to both hosts?
• How do we validate that both hosts are willing?
• How do the hosts validate credentials and good standing of both the migrating user and each other?
• What obligations does each party have to propagate and maintain this effective URL redirect?
• What controls does each party have in order to manage this transition process?
• How do we manage moderation of the incoming content?
• How will this impact current user agreements on most instances?

Any specification here needs to address admins and moderators as key players.

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@jonny Could I possibly encourage you to add a brief 1-2 sentences-or-so "Social Considerations" section -- or, well, the way you organized your headings a "Social" heading in your "Discussion" section -- next to "Privacy" and "Security".

I think in this case the basic Social motivation and implication for this specifically is reasonably obvious to everyone in the discussion right now, but because that obviousness won't be as available to people looking back at this during a more future implementation and won't be as available to people reading this looking for interactions with their own drafting FEP at a later point, it's worth including in the text itself.

If you don't want to or if this isn't the sort of feedback you're looking for no worries and sorry for imposing.
(Alternatively if you'd be up for it but have many other things atm, and if you trust me enough, I could try to grab time from dodging between the holidays at the moment and do a brief one for you, if you want.)

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

@gatesvp
All these questions are addressed in the FEP except moderation, and I'm talking with masto devs about what would be good there

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

@gaditb
I briefly addressed this in the intro but I agree its worth expanding on

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@jonny (My low-key agenda is, I kinda think every FEP should have a section about it. It's like, part of the discussion and the years of prior context people are discussing from,,)

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@jonny Okay actually more directly-specufic-to-content thought. Although one that I don't know the right answer to:

> Constitutively private objects like bookmarks, blocks, and mutes SHOULD be ingested during the ingestion routine for the purposes of creating a seamless migration from the perspective of the migrating Actor, but MUST NOT be included in the migration collection.

For Blocks in particular -- In cases where, as is allowed by SHOULD, a migration (either source or destination) implements migrating posts but /not/ Blocks,
that silently opens up old posts to now no longer be blocked from interaction, which feels particular significant currently (where we don't have shared blocklists) since it means primarily accounts that have been specifically blocked on an individual basis -- likely (? this is an assumption) for recurringly-applicable reasons.

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

@gaditb
Really good point, I have some ideas for language here, and there does need to be a bit more specificity about how to handle visibility for e.g. instance software that may not have blocks importing from software that does - basically that visibility must be at least as constrained as the source object

[gaditb@icosahedron.website]

@jonny Or at minimum alerted to the user, possible?

But does that even. make sense? Most of the stuff here is, because of FEPs' linage from RFCs, spoken in the language of protocols and behavior/format specifications -- is it coherent to define a part of the specifications as the... I guess, social protocol, interface, etc., of a compliant piece of software towards its users?

(On the one hand those are literally the original pre-computer definitions of "protocol" and "compliant", but on the other hand that is CLEARLY misusing the terms there.)

And even if it is coherent, is it possible to actually do it without becoming a "the Passkey people yelling at and threatening the Keepass devs"?

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

@gaditb
I think both are needed and have their place. And in this case I am actually not sure if there is an opposing party to accidentally be perceived as yelling at - as far as I can tell people pretty universally agree that you should retain control of the things you said and did while moving around and not always lose everything (maybe there is some disagreement about what to move, but the FEP is purposely designed to leave that up to the implementation and ideally the actor)

[gatesvp@mstdn.ca]

@jonny

All these questions are addressed in the FEP except moderation

You and I seem to be reading different docs here.

I'm looking at FEP-73cd which looks like the best summary of the various complex cases and it still has several Required use cases that don't have an FEP specification. (table at the bottom)

I'm looking at FEP-1580 and it seems to be operating under the base assumption that "everyone is OK with this". It doesn't use the word "admin" or "administrator" even once. It never addresses "mod" or "moderator" as one of the players in this process.

The words "agreement" or "contract" appear zero times in the specification.

I'm talking with masto devs about what would be good there

That's a reasonable step, but again, I don't think that's the key problem. None of this matters without Masto Admins and Masto Mods also on board.

Every failure case in these specs falls on Admins and Mods to resolve, shouldn't they be first consulted?

[gatesvp@mstdn.ca]

@jonny

This FEP is written to minimize the responsibility of the source instance,

You have this line right there in the spec, and I just don't understand this assumption.

By minimizing the responsibility of the Source instance, you're dumping all of the work on the Target and 3rd Party instances. But they're not the primary actors here.

The key parts of this chain are the Actor and the Source. They trust each other.

• They have an established User Agreement in place
• The Source has an established history of Actor behaviour
• The Actor has a high enough trust in the Source that they have published enough that it justifies migration

When Actor signs up for an account with Target, that new Target User Agreement doesn't assume that Actor is going to bring 200k old posts with them.

If I'm Target, I don't even want this. My default answer here is "no, you cannot do this without talking to me first". We don't have that relationship yet.

This frankly sounds like a giant spam vector.

[gatesvp@mstdn.ca]

@jonny

Inherent in your specification is the assumption that Target's default stance is simply to accept all incoming transfer requests as legitimate.

This is a very Actor-centric view: "It's my content, I can bring it wherever I want, this should be as seamless as possible". But that's an oversimplification of the Publisher (Source) / Actor relationship that's actually in place.

And I don't think that's a fair assumption on behalf of Target. In fact, I don't even think it's a safe assumption for the network as a whole, because it's a giant spam vector. None of this is should be automatic, Target needs an active sign-off on content transfers.

I think this is relevant, because an active sign-off from both Source and Target actually changes parts of these specifications. They don't have to drip transfer, they can coordinate bulk operations, they can negotiate size limits, etc.

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

@gatesvp

It doesn't use the word "admin" or "administrator" even once. It never addresses "mod" or "moderator" as one of the players in this process.

This is why I said "except moderation" and then said "I'm working on it"

this is the least helpful feedback I've gotten, because you are indeed failing to read the document while also assuming that I haven't thought about the most basic parts of the problem.