Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub: This could change the Fediverse forever

Danie
Piece of paper in background covered in pencilled notes and calculations. In the centre is a black rectangle with a white lightning bolt through it. Bottom right is the head and shoulders of a man wearing glasses and wearing a checked shirt. Top left is a symbol with the words ActivityPub Rocks. To the top right is a symbol with the words Hubzilla rules.

Years before there was Mastodon and even ActivityPub, there was Mike Macgirvin who created the Zot protocol, which Hubzilla runs on. One of Hubzilla’s most amazing features (apart from also integrating with Activity and the Fediverse, and having channel relays) is also the nomadic identity that Mike envisioned.

Nomadic Identity is a concept pioneered by Mike Macgirvin, a longtime builder in the Fediverse. If you’ve ever used Friendica, Hubzilla, or Streams, you’ve used software written by this guy.

Nomadic identity is true portability of your identity, along with posts, followers, etc to a new location.

I’ve actually used nomadic identity when I hosted my own Hubzilla instance, and I moved my hosting to a different provider where I could not host my Hubzilla easily in a Docker environment. I resumed my Hubzilla on the secondary channel, and changed that to my primary channel. It just worked.

Hubzilla, with its Zot protocol, also allows for multiple channels on the same account (think of them as separate feeds each with its own profile) which can be used for work, home, a hobby, etc.

I’ll be really happy to see Mike applying his mind to improving ActivityPub as I know he had some fundamental principles which he got right, and which ActivityPub still needs. How, where, and when I don’t know as I remember Mike says way back, that is was easier to create the Zot protocol anew, than to change Friendica’s existing protocol.

Identity Management is one of those pieces of plumbing that’s surprisingly shaky still on ActivityPub but also across all social networks and requires serious consideration. For example, you also cannot migrate your identity from Facebook to say Tumblr at all. I know that Sir Tim Berners-Lee was also working on the same problem, with his POD identity being central for each person, but he has been busy on it for many years and there is no sign at all of any early adoption on any existing social network.

So, if Mike can retrofit his concepts into ActivityPub, then he will likely help cement an important new building block for the Fediverse and all its users.

See https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/