This repository of portability articles needs a little bit of a plan. Initially, we plan to cover the kinds of data types and platforms that individual Internet citizens use and host online. Covering financial, healthcare and business use cases is a lower priority - see "Not Doing" section at bottom. We also plan to focus on articles that involve some level of moving one's data to another place, not just getting a copy to stash on a backup disk.
There are too many variables to make a full matrix of articles we'd like to have (the combination of datatype, source and destination would make a 3D matrix and it would be rather sparsely filled with actual reasonable connections). Instead, this list is organized by data type and exporter or source. Rather than maintain a full list of destinations in this file, please consult the index of published articles.
To browse what's already published, go to where this content repository is hosted with a query interface [URL TBD].
Datatype: "Photos"
Known hosts for photos, which does NOT include sites that host collections of images that are generally not photos:
- Google Photos - started
- iCloud Photos - started
- Flickr
- 500px.com
- Smugmug
Datatype: "Videos"
- YouTube - started
- Vimeo - started
- Microsoft Streams - started
Datatype: "Short-form Media"
This is intended for short videos, image slideshows, memes, and other media - usually vertically oriented for phones!
- Tiktok
Datatype: "Text Social Media"
Use the string "Text Social Media" for this data type. Here we mean the ability to port a collection of text-based social media posts. For the ability to port a social graph or list of follows, there's a different data type
- Mastodon
- X
- Threads
TODO
Datatype: "Follow Lists"
To port a list of people or accounts to follow to another location
- Mastodon
- X
Datatype: "Email"
Note that these should focus on individual people porting their email content, not on businesses migrating a number of business email accounts to a new platform!
- Google Mail
- Microsoft Outlook
- Apple Mail.app
Datatype: "Newsletter"
Newsletter authors who are working alone or in small informal groups often use a newsletter platform. Moving content off that platform, as well as subscribers, is non-trivial. Self-hosted via open source servers is another hosting option. Some newsletter use cases are more corporate than individual so we'll try to focus more on the inidividual use cases.
- Substack
- beehiiv
- ConvertKit
Datatype: "Calendar"
- Apple
- Microsoft
Datatype: "Contacts"
This is distinct from Follow Lists - this is more like address book contents.
- Google Contacts
- Apple Contacts.app and iCloud Contacts - Started
- Microsoft Outlook, Live 365...
Datatype: "Tasks"
- Remember the Milk
Datatype: "Music Playlists"
- YouTube
- Apple Music
- Spotify
- Deezer
Datatype: "Browsing History"
Usually this is ported between browsers when a new browser is installed on a machine, and it finds browsing history from a browser previously installed; or when a new computer gets the same browser installed that the user already synchs to the cloud from another computer. But there are probably ways of doing this more intentionally?
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Safari
- Edge
- Arc
Do you know of a way to port data of the following types? let us know. Some of these can be exported but is there anywhere to port them to?
- Shopping history
- Youtube Watch history
These are the data types we're not planning to focus on for now
- Financial data, even if personal
- Healthcare records, even if personal
- Small business uses cases, including online sales data, ad data
- Enterprise use cases