data portability

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data portability is the ability for the user of a device, service, or site to move their data (anything they author or incidentally create like location tracking) to another device, service, or site (like their indie web site) of their choosing, preferably in an open standard format.

Formats

On the indieweb, the most supported formats are those which are published on sites and actively interoperate across sites using well established protocols such as Webmention. In that regard, the following formats are widely supported for providing and consuming data, and are thus best suited for exports of data for data portability:

• h-feed - for a collection of the user's posts, reactions, even activities.
• h-entry - for information specific to a particular post or page from the user
• h-card - for information about the user, the author or creator of any particular post or piece of data

Additional formats to consider for specific types of data. Some sites may allow creation of special kinds of posts or other types of content. Some of these may be served by specific formats for those purposes better than h-entry:

• h-event - for events created by users
• h-recipe - for recipes

Silo Examples

Below is a list of sites that meet the following criteria:

1. they let you publish things on the web
2. they let you retrieve all the content that you have posted in a reasonably user friendly way (with third party tools, if necessary)

(Note: being able to backup your data from these services means you can transition to running your own site. posse is a better way as the canonical version remains on your site and syndicate to the other services.)

Facebook

Exporting your data (official)

Twitter

Download all your tweets (official)

Google+

Exporting your data (official)

Disqus

Details

Flickr

Flickr have a range of backup tools available.

Instagram

Instaport.me and flickstagram.org let you export your Instagram photos.

Moveable Type

Export to Wordpress.

Tumblr

The Tumblr API allows you to export all of your posts.

There is a Mac application for downloading Tumblr blogs and a web app to export to Wordpress format.

Gina Trapani warns against using Tumblr due to lack of export functionality.

Wordpress.com and Wordpress

Yes. Details.

Articles

• 2017-08-14 US District Court order about hiQ being allowed to scrape public info from LinkedIn.
  • Reuters: U.S. judge says LinkedIn cannot block startup from public profile data

Related

• silos

See Also

• https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/09/30/exploring-data-portability
• export
• migration
• account migration
• Data Portability Kit, project with the goal to extract “your data in a unified, ready-to-use format” from different silo export formats
• Data Transfer Project
• post migration
• 2023-07-01 File over app