Standard procedure and format for migration (import and export)

[xplosionmind]

Some ActivityPub based programs are implementing account migration (from one instance to another) individually.

It would be great if by itself ActivityPub could implement a protocol or a standard to easily migrate from a decentralized social network to another.

Related to #300.

[ChengduLittleA]

was doing implementation for my own blog and yes, this is also a part that's fuzzy. The activitypub spec doesn't include standard for moving follower list as this requires individual followers to change their following record. There doesn't seem to be a way to force them to do so, so it's kinda problematic

[evanp]

Probably the best strategy for this process is as follows:

1. Mastodon has good documentation on how it implements migration. This migration is imperfect for a number of reasons, but it would be great to have a standard document about migration that wasn't tied to any particular project's implementation. So, we'd like to adapt the migration documentation from Mastodon to a FEP to make it less project-specific.
2. We should build on the way Mastodon does it with a backwards-compatible (if possible) next version that covers some of the deficiencies in Mastodon's approach, especially with dead or defederated servers, and migrating content as well as the social graph.

[evanp]

@trwnh would be a great person to take on step 1 above.

[markcellus]

The AP groups are discussing account migration for the fediverse in this thread. Contributors here are extremely important to that discussion. It would be great if you all could chime in there as well.

[snarfed]

Oof yeah, let's merge these instead of duplicating. Also @Timothyjchambers did a bit of research on this recently too, specifically on what's deployed in the wild, he might want to chime in.