SWICG Portability Task Force Call

• Past
• Confirmed

Please join us for the Portability Task Force call, on Thurs, June 20, 2024, on 11am ET / 8am PT / 5pm CET, at:

https://meet.jit.si/social-web-cg-portability-tf

The topic: How should source servers redirect objects, if at all?

The use case in https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/73cd/fep-73cd.md#migration-user-stories:
Alice wants to move her account from Alpha to Gamma, both of which are online and federated to one another... Alice would like Alpha to dynamically redirect any links to Alice@Alpha content to the migrated contents @Gamma (i.e. 301 HTTP codes and nginx-style URL rewrites).

Approach currently suggested in LOLA section 7.2.3: Source servers should remember or be able to detect the object IDs of objects associated with a moved account, when a GET request arrives to try to fetch that object, and reply with a 301 to the destination server, with a URL parameter that allows the destination server to look up the object.

E.g.

• a GET request arrives for https://lemongrove.example.co.uk/2016/05/minimal-activitypub
• the server at example.co.uk can tell by the 'lemongrove' subdomain that this was an object associated with the account "lemongrove" which was moved to "https://newsite.example.org/aurora"
• The server responds with 301 status code and the URL https://newsite.example.org/aurora?redirect_ap_obj=https://lemongrove.example.co.uk/2016/05/minimal-activitypub
• The server at newsite.example.org can lookup the URL in the redirect_ap_obj and reply with a 301 to the objects true new URL "https://newsite.example.org/aurora/posts/0118570514"

Other approaches are definitely possible. One example that would put less onus on the source server to remember anything or keep redirects, would be to advise 3rd parties looking for AP objects that respond with "404 Not Found" to try looking at the actor associated with that AP object and see if that actor moved, then construct the same parameter-enhanced URL as above and send to the place the actor moved to. However, this means that simple Web links will NOT work because it requires the actor sending the GET to have specialized AP knowledge.

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