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1. Fred Brooker (fredbrooker@witter.cz)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Apr-2023 05:20:27 JST Fred Brooker

   in reply to

   • Jupiter Rowland

   @jupiter_rowland the question is, do we need that really?

   • Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Wednesday, 19-Apr-2023 05:20:28 JST Jupiter Rowland
     @Fred Brooker Not on #Mastodon with #ActivityPub as it is right now.
     
     But the #Zot protocol, created by the #Friendica inventor Mike Macgirvin in 2011, seven years before ActivityPub became a standard, allows for something that's called #NomadicIdentity. In fact, Zot was created specifically for this feature.
     
     Friendica with its #DFRN protocol already allows full account portability between instances on a degree that Mastodon users still think is absolutely impossible, and a Friendica account contains much more data than a Mastodon account.
     
     Nomadic identity goes even further: It lets you have the very same channel on multiple instances at the same time. So you don't move to a new instance, leaving a dead and disconnected account behind. You create a 100% clone of your channel. And that clone will remain a clone, for it's kept in-sync with the original in real-time. And you can have as many clones as possible.
     
     Sounds like utter science-fiction, right? But it's reality.
     
     In 2012, four years before Mastodon, Macgirvin himself forked his own Friendica, ported it to Zot and renamed it Red. It was later renamed #RedMatrix, and when it saw its 1.0 stable release in late 2015, still months before Mastodon, it got its final and current name, #Hubzilla.
     
     If you think it's still born, if you think something like this couldn't possibly have survived: Hubzilla is still around. It is still being developed. Its current version is 8.2 from last month, and 8.3 is being field-tested.
     
     And yes, it still offers nomadic identity while each channel has features which Mastodon users couldn't imagine in their wildest dreams. And all of it is kept in-sync between instances by nomadic identity.
     
     Also: I speak to you from Hubzilla right now. No, I'm not on Mastodon, although this should be clear from how long this post already is. Hubzilla has optional ActivityPub support per channel.
     
     And even Zot itself is advancing. Not long after the launch of Hubzilla, Macgirvin created two forks for the development of Zot/6, #Osada with ActivityPub and #Zap without it. More forks came after Hubzilla had been upgraded to Zot/6 in order to develop Zot/8, #Mistpark2020 and #Roadhouse. All four are EOL now and superseded by #Streams which first saw the light of day last year, and which runs on #Nomad, formerly known as Zot/11, providing better integration of non-nomadic protocols such as ActivityPub.