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2026-04-01 20:59:31

silverpill@mitra.social

How Nomadic ActivityPub (FEP-ef61) compares to other protocols?

I made a table:

https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/nomadpub.md#protocol-comparison

2026-04-02 10:40:59

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@silverpill Would be interesting to add Hubzilla's Zot6 and (streams)' Nomad (which would be Zot12 if it wasn't incompatible with Zot6) to the list.

By the way: Forte doesn't require a gateway to communicate with non-nomadic ActivityPub. A fully cloned Forte channel can communicate with a Mastodon account without jumping through hoops. Remember that Forte has almost fully-featured Hubzilla-level nomadic identity (i.e. everything except real-time syncing between channel instances; unlike Hubzilla and (streams) which do sync in real time, it needs a cronjob for that) directly built into its core.

(streams) does support nomadic identity via ActivityPub. But internally, it uses and relies upon Nomad for its nomadic identity. It only supports nomadic identity via ActivityPub a) because it was used as a development platform for just this and b) in order to be able to understand cloned nomadic ActivityPub actors elsewhere. This is also why it isn't possible to move from (streams) to Forte, to move from Forte to (streams) or to clone between (streams) and Forte.

(streams) itself doesn't require gateways to communicate with Mastodon & Co. either. It speaks three protocols natively: its own Nomad, Hubzilla's Zot6 and (optionally, but on by default) standard ActivityPub.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #ActivityPub #Zot #Zot6 #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #NomadicIdentity

2026-04-02 14:19:20

jandi

jandi@mastodon.social

@silverpill (added @jupiter_rowland)

Very interesting, thanks for the link!

I've recently started testing Holos, do you know about it? It seems to me (not a dev) that there are similarities, I hope you don't mind me tagging @HolosSocial to ask if there's something common to any of the listed projects and FEPs with Holos.

https://holos.social/how-it-works

Perhaps it merits a mention in the comparison table?

Thanks to all involved, nomadic/portable fediverse identities is a very exciting prospect.

2026-04-20 02:56:53

ValorZard

valorzard@mastodon.gamedev.place

@silverpill im really excited for this to finally get standarized!
one question though -> do you know if mastodon as an organization would be willing to implement this once its more stabilized? My stuff is on mastodon and I'm not super willing to move everything over to somewhere else.

2026-04-20 14:00:58

silverpill

silverpill@mitra.social

@valorzard As far as I know, they are not interested.

However, @jonny wants to implement FEP-1580: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423#issuecomment-4247163209

FEP-1580 doesn't introduce decentralized identities, but it enables data migrations and is easier to implement. It might pave the way for FEP-ef61 in the future.

2026-04-20 19:32:27

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@ValorZard No dice.

First of all, implementing nomadic identity would drastically alter the way how Mastodon works. It would make Mastodon, something that's supposed to be dead-simple, a great deal more complex.

I mean, in order to really pull this through all the way (as in Hubzilla/(streams)/Forte-level nomadic identity), your identity, your posts, your followers, your followed, your settings, your filters, your everything, all this must no longer directly reside in your account. It must be containerised in something that Hubzilla calls "channel", and that container would then reside in your account and be able to reside in multiple accounts on multiple independent servers.

Next, when Mastodon introduces a new feature, they tend to try to market it as their own original pioneering invention. They can't do that with nomadic identity. There are already enough people who know that nomadic identity was actually pioneered by Hubzilla before Mastodon even existed.

Furthermore, before Gargron implements something invented by Mike Macgirvin, hell will freeze over. Even if he tried to sell it as a unique feature of Mastodon, he'd still secretly have to admit that there's something that Mike did right. And quite a few eyes would be on him in hope of Mastodon getting more features from stuff created by Mike.

Ever heard of OpenWebAuth magic sign-on? Invented by Mike for Osada and Zap in the late 2010s, then backported to Hubzilla.

It was proposed for Mastodon, even if it was only client-side (as in, Mastodon logins would be detected by Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, but Mastodon wouldn't be able to detect OpenWebAuth logins itself). This went as far as a merge request on GitHub. It could have been built into Mastodon. The code was literally there.

The merge request was silently rejected. And that would have been a fairly small change in comparison to the complete rebuild that'd be necessary for a full-blown, Forte-level, server-side implementation of nomadic identity.

I mean, @silverpill had to implement nomadic identity on Mitra client-side. That wouldn't be possible on Mastodon, what with every other Fediverse app being a Mastodon client. Mastodon would require a server-side implementation.

Seriously, it'd be easier to strap Mastodon's Web UI to Forte or Hubzilla with the necessary changes to adapt it to a vastly different backend.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #Mitra #FEP_ef61 #NomadicIdentity