Answer question: How does the Fediverse give me back control over my digital identity and my content?

[jernst]

(Actual question from the press)

[ThisIsMissEm]

It doesn't really. Your content is held hostage by whatever server you sign-up on, because we don't really have a good solution to data portability as it stands today. There are a few ideas being worked on, but none are widely available. Your identity is tied to your server that you sign up on. There are no custom handles.

Theoretically you can move your followers between servers, if the two pieces of software actually implement the same Move activity handling as Mastodon, but that's basically just all those other server's sending your new server a Follow activity automatically, if they federate with that new server.

[trwnh]

in theory, you can register a dns name and host an http server there, which allows you to move the files around and change hosts transparently as long as you retain control over that dns name.

in practice, existing fediverse softwares make too many assumptions that prevent this from being understood. a few softwares like takahe and microblog.pub make it easy to point your dns name at the software and therefore own your identifiers, but popular offerings like mastodon do not support this at all currently.

compounding the issue is the lack of agreed-upon structure for how to map identifiers to content. many fediverse softwares use sql databases with no separation between users, making exports more difficult than they need to be, and typically also do not support imports. there is no agreed-upon well-defined archive format for exports. it's not as simple as taking an archive and unpacking it on your new host; typically you would need to process the archive using an ETL pipeline -- extract the archive, transform the data into the expected local format, load it into the database. unfortunately, ETL pipelines between various fediverse softwares largely have not been written yet at all. historically, there are vanishingly few cases where migrations were performed from GNU Social to Pleroma, or perhaps Mastodon to Pleroma, but the success of such migrations is only possible due to very high overlap in the assumptions being made by each software. migrating Mastodon to Misskey would be much more difficult, and migrating Pixelfed to WriteFreely even more difficult.