In response to Bray’s toot, Evan Prodromou — one of the creators of ActivityPub, who is currently writing an O’Reilly book about the protocol — noted that this “is also the argument for using the ActivityPub API.” He described the API as “an open, extensible API that can handle any kind of activity type — not just short text.”
This gets to the nub of the issue. The fact that I can’t use my Mastodon identity to, for example, sign up to Pixelfed is not actually an ActivityPub issue — it’s because the two applications, Mastodon and Pixelfed, each require you to create an account on their respective products. What Prodromou is suggesting is that, technically, you can use the ActivityPub API for account access.
That’s what I was thinking. It would make it really way for Threads users to try out the various corners of the Fediverse and they are still with Meta because of a demonstrated liking for convenience.
Then you introduce easy account migration so we can offer them greater privacy without losing out of access to their Threads account.
The Fediverse would need to make sure their servers are up to the task of on-boarding all the new users we’d be poaching.
Will this be possible without cooperation from Meta? I assume they would have little incentive to implement a convenient way for users to leave Threads.