I joined a session about data portability. This is the one thing about ActivityPub that disappoints me. Sure, you can migrate follows and followers. But the post migration is missing for most platforms. Truly disappointing.
I'm happy to see some big dev names in here and I am probably coming off as an ungrateful, complaining end user. :AngeryCat:
There's some discussion about the different between MIGRATION and PORTABILITY. With portability being considered a better solution. Migration = moving your posts from one server to another. Portability = separating your posts from the platform entirely.
@box464 I feel like portability is what Bluesky went for with PDS, but ActivityPub doesn't really work that way... I know that ActivityPods are kind of trying to solve that, with personal "pods" that act as AP servers, but ideally we'd have applications using the Client-Server part of AP to go with it, and normalized auth (like OAuth 2 for instance) so we could have clients for each type of applications we want that would connect to generic personal servers, rather than servers that are made for a single purpose and for instance follow the Mastodon API if it's microblogging.
@box464 Great! I wasn't there, but I've been thinking about this kind of issues and am (very slowly) developing an ActivityPub headless server and client application that make use of the Client-Server part of the protocol. Overall, I find that ActivityPub is a bit too loose and lacks fundamental things like defining how deep servers should unwrap linked entities or how to query for specific types of collections, so hopefully if there are devs motivated to work on making the Client-Server part of the protocol as relevant as the Server-Server part, it will be normalized to some extent too.
