Data Portability
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What it is
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The ability for a user to export their data — contacts, followers, content — from one platform and import it into a competing one, preserving relationships and history when they switch.
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Intuition
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The technical version of "your relationships belong to you, not the platform" — if you can take your social graph with you, leaving doesn't mean starting from zero.
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How it works
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A platform or open standard provides a way to export a user's connections in a standard, machine-readable format.
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The user moves to a different service, potentially a different server on the same open network, and imports that file.
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Connections are automatically re-established because the receiving service can look up the same accounts.
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Example
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Mastodon lets a user export their full follow/follower list with one click; uploading that file on a new server re-establishes those relationships automatically.
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