Personal Data Import/Export
Tom Scott
Public
Seen by 196
[Edited by Fla]
This discussion is about account migration between pods.
Current github issue
Summary: We all agree this is an important feature, but it's hard to deal with considering privacy and security issues.
Poll Created Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:22PM
Abandon the feature? Closed Fri 11 Jan 2013 4:01AM
We're not abandoning this feature. :)
We could always abandon this feature. If we do, it means clearing that advert text on diasporaproject, letting people know in the GH Issue that it's not gonna happen in the near future, and closing it out.
I don't necessarily want to do this, but I figured this is the best time to bring up abandoning an issue, as no work has been done yet.
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Agree | 0.0% | 0 | |
| Abstain | 14.3% | 1 |
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| Disagree | 57.1% | 4 |
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| Block | 28.6% | 2 |
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| Undecided | 0% | 134 |
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7 of 141 people have participated (4%)
Tom Scott
Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:23PM
Our users have the rights to the content they post on DIASPORA. Therefore, I think we should press on with this feature as long as we can get it done quickly and without any security issues. Those are my main two concerns.
Sean Tilley
Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:34PM
We shouldn't abandon it. It's a great concept for decentralized social, and being able to easily move off of these larger pods for personal pods is important.
Jason Robinson
Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:39PM
This is one of the most important features missing. Without the ability to migrate to another pod (be it a full wizard or manual export/import with limited dataset) - Diaspora* is just a collection of separate pods, not a proper network.
goob
Thu 10 Jan 2013 10:23PM
This feature is absolutely one of THE key elements of the Diaspora concept of privacy and user ownership of their own data. Without it, Diaspora will not be the network it was set up to be.
However long it takes, it must be implemented eventually.
Jonne Haß Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:42PM
Just digging out what I thought about it like a year ago https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Seed-migration-proposal
Tom Scott Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:44PM
@seantilleycommunitymanager why wouldn't a quick-n-dirty solution like that work? i thought we could just export some sort of big XML feed with all the text of every post along with a folder of images that were posted by the user, collect it in a .ZIP file and be ready to go. would that not be a good solution?
Tom Scott Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:49PM
@jonneha i know it would blow the package up a bit but i think photos are crucial to the migration. it would just be a pain in the ass for users to have to separately download each image.
the way Facebook does it, you can actually pick whether you want photos in the archive. i think we should echo this feature. they also queue the job and email you when its done, since the archive files can get pretty large. I'd be all about doing it this way.
Can this kind of shit even be done on Heroku? We can't alter the filesystem, so where will we put the .ZIP archive?
Jonne Haß Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:58PM
Hm maybe we can get access to a tmpfs on Heroku but in general it's readonly.
Sean Tilley · Thu 10 Jan 2013 9:33PM
I don't feel that the concept should be abandoned. Rather; we need to figure out how to make it work securely based on what's out there now.
Interestingly enough, both Friendica Red's Zot2 implementation and Tent are focusing on this idea of a user being able to literally "pack up and move" from one node on a network to another. Maybe they have some ideas on how it could be done; better yet, maybe we could talk to these different projects about possibly allowing users to move not just between Diaspora hosts, but onto Friendica and Tent hosts as well.
We need an existing implementation of this concept to look to for inspiration on how best to do this. I don't think just a basic "upload your data that you downloaded from the other pod" is exactly going to cut it in the long run.