Feature Request: Migrate from Fediverse to WordPress

[DeadSuperHero]

What

The WordPress-ActivityPub plugin should add a way to migrate to a hosted account from somewhere else in the Fediverse.

Why

Some users want to use WordPress as their main social identity on the Fediverse, and need to migrate away from other platforms to bring their followers with them. Currently, the plugin doesn't support migrating an account to or from WordPress.

How

It probably makes the most sense to look at how Mastodon does account migration, where the old and new accounts refer to one another before a Move action is performed. The old account gets a Tombstone object, and followers are redirected to the new Actor.

One thing that might be a minor headache is whether the blog is configured to be a virtual Actor, or the Authors themselves are Actors instead. The plugin would have to anticipate that, and there might be two flows: one for the blog, one for authors.

[Menrath]

I also discussed this recently which organizations that know have both Mastodon-ActivityPub and WordPress-ActivityPub.

One thing that might be a minor headache is whether the blog is configured to be a virtual Actor, or the Authors themselves are Actors instead. The plugin would have to anticipate that, and there might be two flows: one for the blog, one for authors.

That should not be too much of a problem, as the Move action concretely specifies the target actor.

The problem that I see that this brings even more importance that the Admin UI notes that changing the activation of blog/user actor (or the blog-actors name) is really crucial and should be avoided.

But if we have a move action following would also be possible: When only chaning the blog-actor handle, the followers could be redirected to the new one which would actually be quite cool. Related things are proposed and already being worked on here: #654

Off-Topic but related: Almost any organization I have talked to (about ten) would probably not do this right ahead, because they would miss boosting functionanity, to occasionally promote posts from other (befriended) accounts.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 120 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 5 days.

[Menrath]

I would like to keep this open. Depending on our evaluation results, I might even work on this myself in the beginning of November.

[DeadSuperHero]

Hey @Menrath, just checking in on this, as November is just around the corner!

We're currently doing some experiments with setting up microblogging from our blog Actor, being able to move our main Fediverse account and followers over would be incredible.