@Ben Pate 🤘🏻 2) None of the solutions feel very approachable. Documentation is thin, and examples are hard to find. Beyond the text of FEP-ef61, where should I go if I want to start building support into my own apps?
There isn't much documentation because everything is still very new and also due to the nature of what has already been made with nomadic identity via ActivityPub on which base and which level of stability.

Yes, there's Forte. Yes, it uses ActivityPub for nomadic identity. Yes, it has a stable release.

But: It has never been an ActivityPub project that went nomadic.

It evolved from the Red Matrix (2012)

• based on Zot
• channel system; identity independent of account/login
• nomadic
• some non-nomadic protocols available optionally, off by default

to Hubzilla (2015)

• based on Zot, evolved to Zot6
• channel system; identity independent of account/login
• nomadic
• some non-nomadic protocols available optionally, off by default
• ActivityPub added long after the fact, again, optional and off by default

to some intermediate stuff (2018-2021)

• based on Zot6, Zot8 or (would be Zot11, but it's incompatible with Zot6, so it's renamed) Nomad
• channel system; identity independent of account/login
• nomadic
• fewer non-nomadic protocols available optionally, off by default, if any
• ActivityPub added into the core eventually

to the streams repository (2021)

• based on Nomad
• channel system; identity independent of account/login
• nomadic
• ActivityPub in the core as a secondary protocol, optional, on by default
• all other non-nomadic protocols removed

to Forte (2024)

• based on ActivityPub, supports nothing else
• channel system; identity independent of account/login
• nomadic

So Forte looks back at 13 years of multiple identities per account and nomadic identity. When Hubzilla became the first Fediverse server application to adopt ActivityPub in 2017, the family had already had nomadic identity for over four years.

Implementing nomadic identity via ActivityPub meant switching the whole thing away from a protocol that was built around nomadic identity and over to ActivityPub while keeping nomadic identity.

What you seem interested in is what @silverpill is working on on Mitra. And that's to take a non-nomadic, ActivityPub-only, account-equals-identity server application and make it nomadic.

AFAIK, this is still highly experimental. It's done in a development branch of Mitra. I know that Mitra understands Forte's nomadic identity, but I can't even say whether that dev branch of Mitra is actually nomadic, as in whether you can clone an identity on one server running the dev branch to another such server and have them sync back and forth.

If anything, this would be what ActivityPub devs looking at nomadic identity should check out. "Would" because it's still in such an early and experimental state that I think there isn't anything worth looking at yet other than how to make your software recognise Forte's nomadic channels as nomadic.

By the way, silverpill is publishing FEP after FEP in which Forte or Mitra, (streams) and Forte are mentioned as implementations at most. So he doesn't just code stuff together, he also tries hard to make it "official" by casting it into FEPs. So I guess he's still figuring out the basics and documenting them rather than getting actual nomadicity to work out of thin air.

You've basically got two options if you want to turn non-nomadic, ActivityPub-only, account-equals-identity software into something that's every bit as nomadic as Hubzilla, (streams) or Forte.

Either you wait until silverpill rolls out the first stable release of Mitra with full-blown nomadic identity of its own. And then there should be quite some documentation on how it was done.

Or you make an experimental nomadic branch of Bandwagon and join silverpill and @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in getting nomadic identity via ActivityPub going.

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