@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

@cy

The people who wrote the Fediverse

There were no "people who wrote the Fediverse". These was no committee who laid down the standards.

The Fediverse was invented by @Evan Prodromou. In 2008. By first creating a centralised Twitter alternative silo named Identi.ca.

And then open-sourcing the underlying technology as Laconi.ca, later StatusNet (merged into GNU social in 2013).

And then laying the protocol open as OpenMicroBlogging, later superseded by OStatus.

Then, in 2010, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ decided that the world needs a free, open-source, decentralised, secure alternative to Facebook that's better than Facebook. And so he made Mistpark, today Friendica.

But the features he wanted Friendica to have were impossible to achieve with any existing protocol. OStatus wasn't even that good for microblogging, much less Mike's ambitious plans. Besides, he's an experienced protocol designer. So he created a whole new protocol, DFRN, and built Friendica on top of it. Friendica did adopt OStatus as an extra protocol, though, because Friendica's goal was and still is to federate with everything and then some.

In 2011, Mike had seen many public Friendica nodes shut down with or without warning and people always losing everything and having to start over from scratch. So he decided to do something against it.

He invented nomadic identity. And built a new protocol around it, Zot, because there was no way DFRN could take care of this, let alone OStatus.

In 2012, he forked Friendica into Red and rewrote the whole backend against Zot, which, however, required the creation of yet another identity scheme.

For one, one login could now have multiple fully separate and independent identities on it. For example, my Hubzilla channel URL is https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/channel/jupiter_rowland.

Besides, one identity could now reside on multiple server instances which is what nomadic identity means.

Red was later renamed Red Matrix and, in 2015, refactored, redesigned and renamed into Hubzilla.

Mastodon and Pleroma started in 2016 as OStatus-based alternative UIs for GNU social. Mastodon was the first to be turned into a stand-alone project with not much interest in connecting to anything outside, all in spite of already being federated with Pleroma, GNU social, Friendica and Hubzilla via OStatus.

ActivityPub came out in 2017. No, not 2018. It was standardised in 2018. But it came out in 2017.

In July, 2017, Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to integrate ActivityPub. Next to its own Zot, next to diaspora*, next to OStatus etc. On the one hand, Hubzilla tried to stay as close to the ActivityPub spec as possible and feasible. On the other hand, Hubzilla had to make its ActivityPub integration, which has always been an optional add-on, compatible to its own technology, to its own Zot protocol, to the way it works.

In September, Mastodon was the second Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub. But Mastodon was more interested in doing its own thing and being as close to Twitter as it could than in sticking to a protocol spec, much less connecting to non-Mastodon stuff such as Hubzilla with which it already shared two protocols now.

Mastodon was the one that added Webfinger. ActivityPub doesn't even require Webfinger. The ActivityPub spec doesn't contain Webfinger. But Mastodon requires Webfinger. It can't live without Webfinger. So everything that wants to properly federate with Mastodon needs to implement Webfinger.

After ActivityPub had become a standard, more projects adopted it. But as lax a specification as ActivityPub is, it allowed for a lot of liberties.

Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided it was rubbish and did it their own way.

Some devs looked at how Mastodon had integrated ActivityPub, decided they couldn't do it the same way because what they did was too different from Mastodon and did it their own way.

Some devs didn't look at what anyone else did and did it their own way.

Probably none of them looked at how Hubzilla had integrated ActivityPub because none of them even knew that Hubzilla existed. Except for those who were maintaining Friendica now. And Friendica had to make it compatible with DFRN and with the way it had been working since 2010.

Fast-forward to 2023. Mike's current piece of work was the streams repository which contains an intentionally nameless fork of a fork of three forks of a fork (of a fork) of Hubzilla, slimmed down from Hubzilla, but modernised and technologically even more advanced.

It was then that @silverpill, creator and maintainer of Mitra, got into contact with him because he wanted to add nomadic identity to Mitra. Something that's built on ActivityPub and only supports ActivityPub. A first. No-one had ever done nomadic identity with nothing but ActivityPub before.

So the two started working on how to implement nomadic identity using only ActivityPub. Mike had a vision of a Fediverse with nomadic identity all over and Fediverse identities cloned beyond server application borders. Like, a (streams) channel cloned to Mitra, Mastodon, PeerTube and Mobilizon, all with the same identity.

This, however, required another, brand-new way of identifying Fediverse actors. And so FEP-ef61 "Portable Objects" was created.

We're probably in the middle of xkcd 927 now.

Mike set up an experimental branch of (streams) to develop and test nomadic identity via ActivityPub, also since (streams) already had nomadic identity anyway.

Around summer, the "nomadic" branch (for nomadic identity via ActivityPub) seemed reliable enough to merge it into "dev". And in July, "dev" was merged into "release", complete with nomadic-identity-via-ActivityPub code.

It was shortly after that merge that I created my two (streams) channels. The channel URL of my channel for Fediverse memes is https://streams.elsmussols.net/channel/fedimemes_on_streams. But its DID, which all channels created on accounts registered after that merge got, is https://streams.elsmussols.net/.well-known/apgateway/did:⁠key:z6Mkf2dhUa65zBYCNVqs3AHyt8uPixauZ7bPzEJn15LJANsd/actor. And that's only two IDs of the same channel. There are also others for (streams)' native Nomad protocol, Hubzilla's Zot6 protocol, ActivityPub, OAuth, OAuth2 and probably also OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, another one of Mike's creations. Not to mention that (streams) channels, like Hubzilla channels and Friendica accounts, can also optionally be group actors.

In fact, this blew up into (streams) users' faces because (streams) confused the various IDs to such degrees that it wouldn't federate at all anymore. It took Mike a whole lot of work to iron this out again, so much that he officially retired from Fediverse development on August 31st.

And in the middle of this, he even created yet another fork, Forte, which is (streams) minus Nomad, minus Zot6, based on and supporting only ActivityPub. My guess is still that one of the reasons to create Forte at that point was to get rid of the Nomad and Zot6 IDs to sort the ID mess out.

Even if nomadic identity via ActivityPub should ever become stable and start spreading, I don't expect DIDs to become the one norm in the Fediverse. Not with all those barely or unmaintained projects and those devs who refuse to acknowledge that devs of other projects do great stuff, too.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #OStatus #DFRN #Zot #ActivityPub #Nomad #Laconi.ca #Identi.ca #StatusNet #GNUsocial #Friendica #Hubzilla #Mastodon #Pleroma #Streams #(streams) #Forte #FEP_ef61

@Ben Werdmuller What Bluesky is planning to do with the AT protocol looks like nomadic identity as ordered from Temu.

And nomadic identity is not a vague concept. It isn't futuristic technology either. It has been reality in the Fediverse for longer than Mastodon has been around. It was invented by @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in 2011 and then implemented in his own Zot protocol. Zot, in turn, was first implemented in 2012 in a project named Red, later the Red Matrix, known since 2015 as Hubzilla. And almost everything that Mike has made after Hubzilla had or still has nomadic identity implemented.

I'm writing to you from Hubzilla right now, so yes, it's very much part of the Fediverse. It's a rock-solid daily driver with a stable release (9.4.3).

Nomadic identity does not do away with a domain being part of your ID. What it does away with is the connection between account and identity and the connection between server and identity.

Nomadic identity means that your identity with everything that belongs to it (profile, posts, comments, DMs, connections, files, settings etc. etc. pp.) is no longer bound to any one Fediverse server. It can exist on multiple servers simultaneously. Not as dumb copies, but as clones. Bidirectional, live, hot backups in near-real-time.

Your identity always has one main instance which also lends the domain name. In addition, it can have one or multiple copies on different servers of your choice. Your accounts only serve to grant you access to the instances of your identity on a specific server. The main instance and the clones are constantly sync'd against each other in both directions. For example, after I've sent this comment, it was mirrored over to my clone.

Notice how I've written "bidirectional". For I can also log into my clone and use it just the same as my main instance. This is useful for when the server with my main instance on it is offline. When it comes back online, everything that has happened on my clone in the meantime is being sync'd to the main instance.

Granted, Mastodon and most of the rest of the Fediverse don't understand nomadic identity. When I post from my clone, they take my clone as an independent account with the ID jupiter_rowland@hub.hubzilla.de. But Hubzilla and (streams) do understand nomadic identity. Whatever comes from my clone, they'll correctly identify as being sent by jupter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu in spite of not coming from hub.netzgemeinde.eu.

Even "moving instances" is greatly facilitated. For example, if the server with the main instance of my channel shuts down permanently, I can make my clone my new main instance. That's easy-peasy: two mouse clicks and some 15 minutes of letting things settle, also because Hubzilla will have to go around and change all my connections from jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu to jupiter_rowland@hub.hubzilla.de. On the remote side, on people's Hubzilla and (streams) servers.

You've read that right: If you move, nomadic identity makes your nomadic followers automatically follow you at your new home. What's beyond science-fiction on Mastodon has been daily-driven reality on Hubzilla since its inception in 2015.

While nomadic identity currently only has stable support via Mike's Zot and Nomad protocols and on Hubzilla and (streams), its implementation using only ActivityPub has been in the making since last year.

CC: @glyn

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #DecentralizedIdentity #DecentralisedIdentity #NomadicIdentity #ActivityPub #Zot #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams)

@Bryan Redeagle

I found a really cool one called Zot that had cross site authentication, which made privacy settings really interesting and useful. Unfortunately, the developer took down all of the drive and instead created a reference application called (streams), the parenthesis are correct. (streams) has no good info or documentation. You have to read the code to figure it out.

A few corrections. Source: I've been using that stuff since before Mastodon was hot. Oh, and this is going to be long.

First of all, the creator, @Mike Macgirvin , not only created the Zot protocol, but also a reference implementation at the same time. As in 2012. The reference implementation was named Red and a fork of his very own Friendica from 2010. Since Red turned out to be a not-so-good name, it was renamed Red Matrix. And as it didn't really take off, it was redesigned and renamed into Hubzilla in 2015. Hubzilla still exists today. I'm using it right now.

Mike kept advancing the Zot protocol further and further with a whole string of forks and forks of forks and so forth. Zot6 matured with Zap around 2019 and brought OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on with itself. Both were backported to Hubzilla, which has been maintained by someone else since 2018, in 2010.

Zot's killer feature is not OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, though. It's nomadic identity. The very thing it was designed for.

In 2021, Zot11 was reached, but it had advanced so far that it was no longer compatible with Zot6, so it was renamed to Nomad. Today's Nomad would be Zot12.

(streams) is only a semi-official name, given to it by the community, based on the name of the code repository. Officially, the application is not a project, it is intentionally nameless (no, I'm not kidding, this thing has no name), it is intentionally devoid of any traces of a brand identity, it intentionally had almost all nodeinfo code removed, and it was intentionally released into the public domain.

As (streams) is not a branded product, it does not have a website either.

The reason why it doesn't have any documentation is another one: The documentation it had was painfully outdated. It was basically handed on from fork to fork to fork and never touched. Parts of it have remained untouched since before Osada and Zap were forked from Hubzilla, and that was in 2018. Other parts still speak of Red, and that name ceased to exist in 2012. I know because Hubzilla's current documentation is every bit as old.

Hubzilla is right now having its entire documentation re-written from scratch in German and English by a community member.

For (streams), however, the only solution was to rip the whole documentation out because no documentation was deemed better than one that's so outdated it's useless.

It was considered not so bad for as long as how few people a) learned about (streams) and b) figured out how to find an open-registration instance of something that has neither third-party instance lists nor a unified instance identifier actually joined (streams). After all, they all came from Hubzilla, so they could figure out most themselves.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Zot #Zot6 #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #NomadicIdentity #SingleSignOn #OpenWebAuth