Personal Data Import/Export

@goob I was thinking about that but without a special information for the contacts. They would just receive the classic “bob started sharing with you” when contacts will be imported in the new account, I think this is enough.

Proposal: Create manual export/import as short-term measure

Just to get things moving, I propose that we implement a manual two-step export/import process while deciding on the best method for implementing automated pod migration in the future.

The user is responsible for the security of their data (and those of their contacts) during the export/import process. They download their account data in toto, including contact information, to a local source (hard drive etc), then separately upload this account information to a new pod.

The exact method of doing this can be agreed if the proposal is passed in principle.

This is just a measure to allow account migration in the short term.


Outcome: There’s agreement in principle for a short-term manual solution. Now to work out how this can be implemented, and if there’s a way to do it which will require less effort than the full solution.

Votes:

  • Yes: 16
  • Abstain: 2
  • No: 0
  • Block: 0

Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.

I thought a good idea to create an interim proposal in the hope of moving things forward.

Would it be worth doing a call-out from the Diaspora HQ account for people to form a working group to work on this issue? It is a key one and likely to be quite labour-intensive. If so, what should the notice say? I can post it once we’ve decided.

Importing posts is a bit tricky as they would all have to be new instances of the post. Don’t really see what the benefit of this would be since all interactions with the posts would be left behind.

I’m not convinced a temporary export/import will solve the “problem”, but it would at least be a start.
We need a working export function anyway…

Diaspora* claims that you own your data - but we don’t have a working export like many other services, Facebook for example :wink: I’d consider this a high prio.

I don’t think it’s a long-term answer, @florianstaudacher , but it would provide at least a rough-and-ready means for people who are really keen to move pods to do so. And as it’s been one of the cornerstones of the Diaspora philosophy and marketing from the beginning that you can move pods, I think it would be good to have at least some means of doing so as soon as possible.

I’d suggest also including profile information as well as contacts/aspects/followed tags.

@goob profile information could be personal data, I think we should not include that while we don’t have a secure process.

Fla, I don’t see it that way: we’re entrusting the user who is migrating their account with the security of that account data between export (which can only be done by the person with the account password, so is secure) and import to a new pod.

This includes contact information, which are other people’s private data, so if we can entrust the migrating user with those data, we must be able to entrust them with their own profile information.

if they are silly and lose/give away the export before uploading it to a new pod, that’s their own fault, isn’t it?

@flaburgan - why should a user not be able to import profile data from an archive? It’s just text after all - they can set it by hand to whatever they want anyway.

The security issue comes from migrating posts which is the content that has interactions with other users and those interactions cannot be remapped easily. But profile data is just personal data that the user should be able to take with them and import.

Also we really should allow users to export their own post (without interactions, like comments and likes by other people). Just for archiving, not uploading. We advertise that users own their own data. Even facebook and google services allow export of data :slight_smile:

I’d like to point out how integral this feature is once again. Yesterday on a post of Sean’s the discussion got crazy essentially over the fact it’s way to hard to pick up and move to a pod. https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2773187 we definitely need to commit time to working on this.

Do you think it would be good to advertise on D itself for developers to form a working group to help create this? I can post from the DHQ account if someone who has technical knowledge will help me draft a post.

I think for this and the other key but major things, it’s a good idea to set up dedicated working groups who will work on the task. There’s a proposal at the moment to do this for federation, for example.

Dennis, I agree that ‘quick and dirty’ solutions aren’t always ideal, however they can sometimes be better than no solution, which is what we have at the moment regarding account migration.

And this manual solution need not be ‘quick and dirty’ in coding terms, but might well be an easier thing to code than a fully automated process such as Jonne proposed earlier in the discussion, and therefore could be developed and implemented more quickly.

Just to provide reference for anyone that missed it, information and code for the migration script @jasonrobinson has been working on can be learned about in this post: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/2814800

Aiming to get a new version out soon that uses the latest diaspy and also does tags. But this is just a little hack helper thingy, we need proper export and after that a little-by-little import functionality (contacts at least first, like this script does them but internally).

@jasonrobinson Hey, what’s the progress on this?

@seantilleycommunit just haven’t had time :frowning: Hopefully I’ll get it done asap, so user doesn’t need to know anything except run some commands in the terminal.

@jasonrobinson has there been any progress on your script, and do you think it’s something on the base of which a migration feature might be able to be worked into the Diaspora codebase in the future?