@KellamБур This may come as a surprise, but: Nomadic identity is not an abstract concept or a science-fiction idea for the Fediverse.

It is reality. It exists. Right now. In stable, daily-driver software that's federated with Mastodon. And it has been for over a decade.

I'm literally replying to you here from a nomadic channel that simultaneously exists on two servers.

Nomadic identity was invented by @Mike Macgirvin (formerly American software developer of about half a century who has been living in rural Australia for decades now) in 2011 and first implemented in 2012. Almost four years before Mastodon was first launched.

In 2010, he had invented the Facebook alternative Friendica, originally named Mistpark and based on his own DFRN protocol.

Over the months, he witnessed lots of privately operated public Friendica nodes shut down with or without an announcement and the users on these nodes lose everything. He added the possibility to export and import Friendica accounts. But that would only help if a permanent shutdown was announced. It did not protect you against shutdowns out of the blue.

There was only one solution to this problem. And that was for someone's identity to not be bound to one server, but to exist on multiple servers simultaneously. The whole thing with everything that's attached to it. Name, settings, connections, posts, files in the file storage etc. etc., everything.

So in 2011, Mike designed a whole new protocol named Zot around this brand-new idea of what he called "nomadic identity" back then already.

In 2012, Mike forked Friendica into something called Red, later the Red Matrix, and rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up against Zot. Red was the first nomadic social networking software in the world, almost four years before Mastodon.

In 2015, ten months before Mastodon was first released, the Red Matrix became Hubzilla, the Fediverse's ultimate Swiss army knife.

I am on Hubzilla myself. This channel of mine is constantly being mirrored between its main instance on https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu and its clone on https://hub.hubzilla.de. Anything that happens on the main instance is backed up on the clone. I can also log into the clone and use that, and whatever happens there is backed up on the main instance.

https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu could go down, temporarily, permanently, doesn't matter; I still have my channel, namely the clone. And I can declare the clone my new main instance.

Well, Mike didn't stop at Hubzilla and its original version of the Zot protocol. He wanted to refine it and advance it, but in ways that wouldn't be possible on daily-driver software.

Zot went through several upgrades: Zot6 in 2018 (backported to Hubzilla in 2020, along with OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on). Zot8 in 2020. Zot11 in 2021 which had become incompatible with Zot6 and therefore was renamed to Nomad. Today's Nomad would be Zot12.

Also, in order to advance and test Zot, Mike created a whole bunch of forks and forks of forks. Osada and Zap for Zot6 in 2018, followed by another short-lived Osada in 2019. A third Osada, Mistpark 2020 (a.k.a. Misty) and Redmatrix 2020 in 2020 for Zot8. Roadhouse for Zot11 Nomad in 2021. All Osadas, Zap, Misty, Redmatrix 2020 and Roadhouse were discontinued on New Year's Eve of 2022.

The most recent software based on Nomad is from October, 2021. It can be found in the streams repository. It is officially and intentionally nameless and brandless, it has next to nodeinfo code that could submit statistics, and it is intentionally released into the public domain. The community named it (streams) after the code repository.

I also have two (streams) channels, one of which is cloned so far.

The newest thing, and that's what the Friendica and Hubzilla veteran @Tim Schlotfeldt ?️‍? referred to, is nomadic identity using nothing but ActivityPub, no longer relying on a special protocol.

This was not Mike Macgirvin's idea. This came from @silverpill, the creator and developer of the microblogging server application Mitra. He wanted to make Mitra nomadic, make it resilient against server shutdown. But he didn't want to port it to Nomad. He wanted to achieve it with nothing but ActivityPub.

So he hit up Mike. The two came to the conclusion: This is actually possible. And they began to work on it. Amongst the results were several FEPs coined by silverpill.

This time, Mike did not create another fork to develop nomadic identity via ActivityPub. He did it all on the nomadic branch of the streams repository while silverpill did his part on a special development branch of Mitra.

In mid-2024, after enough sparring between (streams) instances, between Mitra instances and between (streams) and Mitra, Mike was confident enough that his implementation of support of nomadic identity via ActivityPub was stable enough. He merged the nomadic branch into the dev branch which ended up being merged into the stable release branch in summer.

Now, at this point, (streams) didn't use ActivityPub for nomadic identity. It still used the Nomad protocol for everything first and foremost, including cloning. But it understood nomadic identity via ActivityPub as implemented on experimental Mitra.

However, while it worked under lab conditions, it blew up under real-life conditions. At this point, (streams) had to handle so many different identities that it confused them, and it couldn't federate with anything yet.

In mid-August, while trying to fix the problem, Mike eventually forked the streams repository into Forte. It got a name again, it got a brand identity again, it got its nodeinfo back, it was put under the MIT license again.

But most importantly: Any and all support for Nomad was ripped out, also to get rid of a whole number of IDs, namely those for Nomad-actually-Zot12 and for Hubzilla's Nomad-actually-Zot6. Forte only uses ActivityPub for everything. And so, Forte also had to fully rely on ActivityPub for nomadic identity, cloning and syncing.

For almost seven months, Forte was considered experimental and unstable. For most of the time, the only existing servers were Mike's.

But on March 12th, 2025, Mike Macgirvin released Forte 25.3.12, the first official stable release of Forte. This is what Tim wrote about. Because this actually made it into Fediverse-wide news.

Not because it's nomadic. Nomadic identity has been daily-driven for over a decade now.

But because it uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity. Which means that you can theoretically make any kinds of Fediverse software nomadic now, all without porting it to the Nomad protocol first.

For the future, Mike and silverpill envision a Fediverse in which one can clone between different server applications. A Fediverse in which one can have one and the same identity cloned across multiple servers of Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Mitra, Forte, Mobilizon, Lemmy, BookWyrm etc., all with the same name, all with the same content and settings (as far as the software allows; you will certainly not be able to clone your PeerTube videos to Mastodon and Lemmy).

Even if you don't intend to clone, it will make moving instances and even moving from one software to another dramatically easier.

If you're concerned about your privacy, let me tell you this:

Hubzilla's privacy, security and permissions system is unparalleled in the Fediverse. Except for that on (streams) and Forte which is another notch better.

I can define who can see my profile (my default, public profile on Hubzilla where each channel can have multiple profiles).
I can define who can see my stream and my posts when looking at my channel.
I can define who can see my connections (Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte don't distinguish between follower and followed; they aren't Twitter clones).
I can define who can look into my file space (individual permission settings per folder and per file notwithstanding).
I can define who can see my webpages on Hubzilla (if I have any).
I can define who can see my wikis on Hubzilla (no shit, I've got wikis on my Hubzilla channel).

On Hubzilla, I can define individually for any of these whether it's

• everyone on the Internet
• everyone with a recognisable Fediverse account
• everyone on Hubzilla (maybe also on (streams); anyone using ActivityPub is definitely excluded here)
• everyone on the same server as myself (AFAIK, only main instances of channels count here, clones don't)
• unapproved (= followers) as well as approved (= mutual) connections
• confirmed connections
• those of my confirmed connections whom I explicitly grant that permission by contact role
• only myself

There's a whole bunch more permissions than these. And they all have seven or eight permission levels (depending on whether the general non-Fediverse public can be given permission).

On (streams) and Forte, I can define whether things are allowed for

• everyone on the Internet (where applicable)
• everyone with a recognisable Fediverse account
• all my approved connections
• only me myself plus those whom I explicitly grant that permission in the connection settings

Yes, connection settings. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte give you various ways of configuring individual connections, much unlike Mastodon. This includes what any individual connection is allowed to do.

Hubzilla uses so-called "contact roles" for that, presets with a whopping 17 permissions to grant or deny for any one individual connection. That is, what the channel generally allows, a contact role can't forbid.

(streams) and Forte still have 15 permissions per contact, but they lack some features which Hubzilla has permissions for. These permissions can be set individually for each connection, or you can define permission roles that cover all 15 permissions to make things easier.

Okay, how about posting in public vs in private? And when I say "private", I mean "private". It's "private messages" on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, not "direct messages".

Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte let you post

• in public
• only to yourself
• only to your connections ((streams) and Forte only; Hubzilla requires a privacy group with all your connections in it for this)
• to all members of one specific privacy group (Hubzilla)/access list ((streams), Forte); that's like being able to only post to those on one specific list on Mastodon
• to everyone to whom one specific non-default profile is assigned (Hubzilla only)
• to a specific group/forum (I'll get back to that later)
• to a custom one-by-one selection of connections of yours

Now, let's assume I have a privacy group with Alice, Bob and Carol in it. I send a new post to only this privacy group. This means:

• Only Alice, Bob and Carol can see the post and the conversation.
• Alice can reply to me, Bob and Carol.
• Bob can reply to me, Alice and Carol.
• Carol can reply to me, Alice and Bob.
• Nobody else can see the post. Not even by searching for it. Not by hashtag either. Not at all.
• Nobody else can see any of the comments.
• Nobody else can comment.

If one of them was on Mastodon, they'd see my post as a DM, by the way, and they could only reply to me. But that's Mastodon's limitation because it understands neither threaded conversations nor permissions.

Or how about reply control? This is something that many Mastodon users have been craving for quite a while now. Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte have them. Right now. And they work. They have since 2012.

Hubzilla optionally lets me disallow comments on either of my posts. Users on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte won't even be able to comment; they won't have the UI elements to do so. Everyone else is able to comment locally. But that comment will never end up on my channel. It will never officially be added to the conversation. And at least users on Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte will never fetch that comment from my channel as part of the conversation, i.e. never at all.

(streams) and Forte can go even further with all available options. They can disallow comments like Hubzilla. But in addition, they can allow only the members of one particular access list to comment, regardless of who can see the post/the conversation. On top of that, comments can be closed at a pre-defined point in the future. And then you even have a channel-wide setting for how long people can comment on your posts.

Oh, and there's even a setting for who is generally permitted to comment on your posts. And you can additionally allow specific connections of yours to comment on your posts.

Lastly, I've already mentioned groups/forums. Like, you know, Web forums or Facebook groups or subreddits or whatever. Like Guppe Groups on a mountain of coke and with moderation and permission control and optionally private.

Hubzilla has them, and it has inherited them from Friendica. (streams) has them. Forte has them. They're basically channels like social networking channels, but with some extra features. This includes that everything that's send to a group/forum as what amounts to a PM is automatically forwarded to all other members.

On Hubzilla, a forum can be gradually made private by denying permission to see certain elements to everyone but its own members (= connections): the profile, the members, what's going on in it. Depending on what you want or do not want people to see.

On (streams) and Forte, you have four types of forums:

• public, and members can upload images and other files to the forum channel
• public, but members cannot upload images and other files to the forum channel
• like above, but additionally, posts and comments from new members must be manually approved by the admin(s) until their connections are configured to make them full members
• private, non-members can't see the profile, non-members can't see the connections, non-members can't see what's going on in it, but members can upload images and other files to the forum channel

In addition, on all three, a group/forum channel can choose to hide itself from directories. This is always an extra option that's independent from public/private.

What we have here is the most secure and most private Fediverse software of all.

And, once again, at its core, this is technology from 2012. It pre-dates Mastodon by almost four years.

Finally, if you want to know how Hubzilla and (streams) compare to Mastodon: I have made a number of tables that compare Mastodon, Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams).

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Zot8 #Nomad #NomadicIdentity #Security #FediverseSecurity #Privacy #FediversePrivacy #Permissions

@Red I do hope the "Mastodon equals Fediverse, and it must stay this way" crowd won't push only having one account and one identity in the Fediverse into the same "Mastodon culture" that's being forced upon the whole Fediverse by some Mastodon fundamentalists.

That would essentially "outlaw" two features that almost nobody in the Fediverse has ever heard of, but that have been available in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon itself, both introduced by a Friendica fork from 2012 named Red, known since 2015 as Hubzilla. And at least three out of four Fediverse users have never even read that name before.

One feature is nomadic identity: You can have "clones", live, hot, bidirectional backups of your Fediverse identity on multiple server instances. Imagine having copies of your Mastodon accounts on other servers, but these copies include everything (posts/DMs, followers, followeds, settings, timelines, filters, lists etc. etc.), and these copies keep each other in sync all the time whenever something happens on them. That's nomadic identity.

You can long into your clones and use them just like you can use your main instance. You can make one of your clones your new main instance. Your Fediverse identity is safe from vanishing with the shutdown of a Fediverse server. And other servers that understand nomadic identity see all instances of your identity as one.

Currently, at least to non-developers, nomadic identity is only available on Hubzilla, using Zot, and (streams), using Nomad, and you can only clone between instances of the same server software. But the implementation using ActivityPub is being worked on, and the goal is to one day be able to have the same identity on servers of different applications.

Nomadic identity not only fulfills the dream of being able to move between instances with everything, but it goes way beyond. In many cases, it means you don't even have to move.

Nomadic identity means that you've got multiple accounts, but one identity.

The other feature is a byproduct of the creation of nomadic identity: multiple identities on the same account, the same login. Hubzilla and (streams) call them channels.

It actually makes sense to have multiple of these because (streams) channels can be versatile and Hubzilla channels even more so. On both, you can run a channel as a public or private discussion group. Or you can run a channel as you personal WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV server that's independent from your main social networking identity. Or you can run a channel as a blog that's separate from your main social networking identity. Or, on Hubzilla, you can run a channel as a wiki or a website.

You can run as many channels on one account as you want. The advantage of having multiple channels on one account over having one account per channel is that you can switch between channels without having to log out and back in.

In both cases, your Fediverse identity is detached from your login. A concept completely alien to most of the Fediverse. And I guess the only reason why Hubzilla users aren't mass-blocked for this is because sensitive Mastodon users often don't notice any of this.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity

@Jenniferplusplus I sincerely hope that you aren't building Letterbook to only interact with itself and Mastodon.

Sooner or later, Letterbook will encounter content coming in from instances of software created by @Mike Macgirvin ?️, namely Friendica, Hubzilla (these two are actually older than Mastodon), (streams) or Forte. For reference: I am on Hubzilla.

You/it will have to expect and be able to deal with the following:

• Enclosed one-post-many-comments conversations instead of threads that consist of posts loosely tied together
• Permissions of all comments/replies firmly defined by the start post; permissions/visibility can't be changed within a running conversation
• "Monster posts" of any length because none of them has a character limit
• Not just Note-type objects, but also Article-type objects (from Friendica right now, the others may implement them once Mastodon introduces sensible support for them)
• Full HTML text formatting, up to and including numbered lists, tables, horizontal lines, character size and character colour
• Both quotes (as done in bulletin-board forums) and quote-posts (posts fully embedded in other posts like quote-tweets)
• Embedded links (this comment makes a whole lot of use of them)
• Inline images embedded within the text, and more than four of these in one post
• Inline audio streams embedded within the text
• Inline videos embedded within the text
• "Weird" mentions and hashtags with the @ or the # not part of the link (look at the mentions and the hashtags in this comment, then look at mentions and hashtags on Mastodon and compare them)
• "Summaries in the CW field" (because Mastodon repurposed StatusNet's summary field, which was used by StatusNet, Friendica and Hubzilla as an actual summary field, for content warnings in 2017; several Fediverse server apps continue to use it for summaries)
• All four support titles in addition to summaries

Some of the above may also come in from elsewhere, e.g. a wider range of text formatting than Mastodon allows itself to render is fully supported by just about everything that isn't Mastodon.

Also, ActivityPub is currently evolving. New FEPs are being put to use and bringing in new features far away from how Mastodon is working. In particular, (streams) and Forte and @silverpill's Mitra use decentralised identifiers as per FEP-ef61 (Portable Objects). Forte has nomadic identity fully implemented via ActivityPub while (streams) at least supports it. And all three have conversation containers implemented, silverpill wants to make them an FEP, and Hubzilla is planning to implement them with version 10.

This means three things. One, weird identifiers. Two, weird actor identities: What looks like one user automatically cross-posting to another account on another instance to non-nomadic ActivityPub implementations is actually the very same actor residing simultaneously on multiple server instances. Three, again, conversations work drastically different from Twitter and Mastodon.

Lastly, it may be a good idea to implement a little server type display from the get-go so that the user knows what kind of Fediverse instance something comes from. Misskey and its forks have it, Friendica has it, (streams) has it, Forte has it. Just because Mastodon doesn't have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea not to have it. Besides, if content from certain server applications malfunctions on Letterbook, users can pinpoint right away what server application causes that trouble when submitting a bug report.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mitra #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Conversations #ConversationContainers #FEP_ef61 #NomadicIdentity

@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝

What I don't understand: Why did Zot/Nomad have to be kicked out?

Probably due to the ID chaos.

Federation on (streams) went bellies-up with the introduction of FEP-ef61 DIDs due to the plethora of IDs everything had suddenly. All kinds of different IDs from conventional ActivityPub. Plus at least one Nomad ID. Plus at least one Zot6 ID. And now the DID on top. (streams) ended up being confused about this maze of IDs itself and used all the wrong IDs in all the wrong use-cases.

Remember how federation still was on the fritz in mid-August? When Forte was forked off?

One of the reasons Mike created Forte was to throw Nomad and Zot6 out without throwing Nomad and Zot6 out of (streams). It was probably a kind of quick fix to assume control over this ID chaos by removing the non-ActivityPub parts and, most importantly, the non-ActivityPub IDs.

That kind of lines up with what Mike did earlier. Like in 2018 when he made Osada and Zap, the two experimental development platforms for Zot6. Why didn't he do that in a development version of Hubzilla with all of Hubzilla's features still in place? And, most importantly, only one development version with all the shebang?

That's because in 2018, when Zot6 was only an idea, this idea had one big caveat: Mike's earliest concept of Zot6, especially its nomadic identity implementation, clashed with all other protocols.

So he created Zap that only spoke Zot6. Zap was only able to federate with Hubzilla because Zot6 was still sufficiently compatible with Hubzilla's version of Zot. Zap was the platform to develop the nomadic identity side of Zot6.

And he created Osada that spoke a bunch of other things, including ActivityPub and diaspora*. But it had no nomadic identity.

He slimmed both down a great deal. Articles, cards, wikis, webpages etc., it all had to go. Why? To also slim down development. Otherwise he would have had to touch much, much more code. Besides, Hubzilla already had all that stuff. Same reason why (streams) can't subscribe to feeds anymore: less code to maintain and upgrade all the time.

The reason why the first Osada was discontinued was because it turned out that a) Zot6 could indeed be made compatible with at least ActivityPub, and b) having Osada as a "bridge" between Zap and the rest of the Fediverse was just plain bonkers. You wanted to use Zap, but you wanted to keep your Mastodon and diaspora* friends? You also needed one non-nomadic Osada channel for each one of your nomadic Zap channels. And you had to use Osada to share-post all your Zap posts because Zap had no repeats yet, and you needed Osada to interact with the stuff your non-nomadic friends posted. Oh, did I mention that Osada was non-nomadic, and you'd lose everything if your Osada instance went under?

So Mike discontinued the old Osada which next to nobody had used anyway, forked a second Osada from Zap and added ActivityPub to it so he had purist, Zot6-only Zap with no ActivityPub in the way of experimenting with Zot6 plus Osada with which he could test the interaction of ActivityPub and Zot6. Other devs would have strapped ActivityPub onto Zap. Not Mike, though.

But... if he now develops Forte exclusively with AP into a functioning platform, the nomadic identity will again be limited to the resulting ‘Forte Grid’, because I expect a number <1 that will implement AP nomadics in a new or existing AP Fediverse service.

Mitra is working on nomadic ActivityPub, too. Very hard so. Since 2022. Silverpill was the very creator of FEP-ef61, and he is even more of a driving force behind adding nomadic identity to ActivityPub than Mike. I wouldn't be surprised if it was him who had nudged Mike into developing ActivityPub-based pan-Fediverse nomadic identity.

Let all this work out. Let Forte become stable. Let Mitra roll out nomadic identity. Let it become possible to clone between the two. Let this hit Fediverse News. And you'll have quite a number of heads turning, including developer heads. Of course, most likely not those of the Mastodon devs. But it isn't unlikely that others will be interested.

And the more things in the Fediverse have working, stable, ActivityPub-based nomadic identity, the more Mastodon users will nag the Mastodon devs to implement it because they're fed up with being stuck on their instances already now. Until the point at which someone forks Mastodon, adds nomadic identity and submits the changes to the Mastodon code repo as a PR.

But it would have given you the opportunity to operate nomadically with the Hubzilla grid and thus have a much larger base.

Sooner or later, Hubzilla, the nomadic identity pioneer, will have to at least learn to understand ActivityPub-based nomadic identity. Once the latter is fully fleshed out, this might not even be that difficult. It can always be tested on development hubs like Zotum first.

Mario already said Hubzilla will hold on to Zot6. This may mean that it won't be possible to clone between Hubzilla and anything else if ActivityPub-based nomadic identity isn't fully implemented. But this wouldn't be much different from what things are like right now.

It is exciting. But the advantages of nomadic identity are very limited until the majority of other AP-based Fediverse services also implement it.

Well, for each Fediverse project individually that implements it, it's a big step forward.

Let's assume some Forkey implements it. The big news won't be so much that you can now clone your account to (streams) and Mitra. It'll rather be first and foremost that you can clone to another instance of the same Forkey and save your identity from doom by instance shutdown. Cross-border cloning is just a nice extra.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #NomadicIdentity #Forte