The Fediverse promises portability. In practice you don't have it.
The Fediverse is decentralised by design, but leaving the instance you first joined usually means losing your history. Mastodon can forward your followers — almost nothing carries your actual posts and media, and nothing works when you move to a different software. After the post-2022 growth wave, instance shutdowns and admin burnout are common, and each shutdown can erase users' histories. Fedi-Port is the safety net that's missing.
What Fedi-Port does
Export
Pull your account — posts, threads, media, follows/followers, blocks — into a documented, software-neutral archive format (FAR), not a software-specific cold dump.
Encrypted local backup
The archive is encrypted client-side and stored on hardware you control. Private posts and DMs are off by default and never pass through a third party.
Migrate / import
Re-create your account on another instance — or another software — carrying content and graph, using ActivityPub Move/alsoKnownAs for follower continuity.
Why it's different
No existing tool delivers cross-software, content-complete, privacy-preserving account portability for the Fediverse in one self-hostable artefact.
- Mastodon account migration moves followers, but not your posts or media, and only Mastodon-to-Mastodon.
- ActivityPub Move / alsoKnownAs is a follower-graph redirect, not a content-migration mechanism — your posts stay behind.
- Per-software export tools each produce their own dump with no neutral interchange format and no import path into different software.
- Nomadic identity (Hubzilla / streams) genuinely solves portability — but only inside its own protocol family, not the much larger ActivityPub population.
- Fedi-Port adds a software-neutral archive format plus per-platform adapters, so an export from one implementation can be imported into another — content + graph + media, end-to-end, under user control.
Deliberate v1 scope. v1 targets the microblog family (Mastodon + GoToSocial), where ActivityPub object models align closely. Video and link-aggregation software (PeerTube, Lemmy, BookWyrm) have materially different object models and are explicit future adapters — not 7-month promises.
Built to be verifiable
The primary deliverable is a statically linked Rust binary with a reproducible build, so any user can check the binary against source. A Nix flake is provided as an additional packaging target for the NixOS-based Fediversity stack.
Roadmap — ~7 months from grant award
| Milestone | What ships |
|---|---|
| M1 | Architecture RFC + open FAR format draft + repo bootstrap; SocialHub / W3C Social CG design engagement |
| M2 | Export MVP for Mastodon — posts, media, graph into FAR; contributor onboarding opens |
| M3 | Encrypted local backup + GoToSocial adapter; minimal migration UI mockups → iteration |
| M4 | Import / migrate path with ActivityPub Move + alsoKnownAs follower continuity |
| M5 | Cross-software migration Mastodon ↔ GoToSocial; conformance test suites per adapter |
| M6 | 3–5 real user migrations validated (with testbed fallback guaranteeing ≥1 cross-software result) |
| M7 | 1.0 release + reproducible binary + Nix flake + full docs + demo |
Who's building it
Ruslan Hryban — sole engineer and applicant (Ukraine). 23+ years of systems-engineering and operations experience, 3+ years building MCP servers, AI agents and multi-channel integrations across web, mobile and chat platforms. Public portfolio: griban.dev · GitHub: github.com/sattva2020 (73+ public repositories, including dokploy-mcp and N8N-AI-Starter-Kit — self-hosting and deployment-automation work directly relevant to a tool meant to run on user-controlled hardware). External freelance support is budgeted only for UI/UX.
Funding
Fedi-Port has applied for funding from the NLnet Foundation through the NGI Fediversity fund, part of the European Commission's Next Generation Internet initiative. Application status: in preparation / under submission, 2026.
Until grant award, contributions are paused — a CONTRIBUTING.md with code-of-conduct, DCO signing and good first issue labels is planned for M1. Star or watch the repository to follow progress.