Even Whatsapp is using PKI, its just all hidden away from the user.
Of course, the phrase that gains traction won't be "keypair".
A far mor likely outcome is for government-managed identities to become the only way to access certain kinds of services, for better and for worse. Governments already have the identity management part handled, with the legal system acting as the ultimate fall-back for any corner case. The integration is already widely used for certain services (the entire financial system relies on government-managed identities already, all around the world), so it's just a matter of extending this. It also helps solve certain less talked about problems of identity systems, such as preventing children from accessing certain kinds of content.
Ideally, instead of the current solution of every institution having access to all of your personal details so they can check your identity with the government, governments could start working for the opposite model - a government-issued and managed IdP, where only the government knows your personal details, and where enterprises get an opaque token they can use to ask the government about a set of details they need to operate their business.
1. I don't want to trawl through garbage to reach posts I like. Even a single gore video or such is enough to ruin most people's day.
2. It's not enough for me to block content I don't like - in certain situations, I have a legitimate need to block others from seeing content I don't like. Specifically, if someone is spreading lies about me, or pornography of me, the fact that I can block that person is not going to help me, I need a way for the platform to stop showing those lies/pornography to others, or at least to automatically attach my own version of the story to those lies (of course, I should first have to somehow prove those are lies).
The authoritarian approach is that you want to ensure no one else sees what you don’t like. You don’t want to give them the choice.
I'm not talking about preventing other people from listening to flat earth conspiracy theories that I don't like.
The globally distributed nature of the internet complicates jurisdiction, but this has always been true of the internet. If someone uploads porn of you to 300 porn sites and 10,000 tor sites, it’s very difficult to get it all taken down. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the internet. It’s accomplishing its original intent.
Edit: but perhaps that is your complaint? You believe the internet is fundamentally flawed in that there is no central authority which has the power to control all information? I understand the allure of this, but I believe this wound be ruinous for the internet and human progress.
Overall, what I'm saying is that many people who espouse the virtues of decentralized or federated social media forget or minimize some of the actual benefits of centralized social media with strong moderation [0].
While I think it's great that the internet as a whole is uncontrollable, I don't think "living" in the less controlled parts of the internet for most of your online life would be a pleasant or healthy experience.
[0] I should note that I have some serious qualms about the harm some of this content does to the moderators themselves, but I'm not sure how to grapple with that particular issue.
But right now something very conerning is happening in western democracies that threatens to shift the balance very far in an authoritarian direction. And leaning on centralised platforms is at the centre of it.
Platforms are no longer just told "here's this revenge porn video, it's illegal, take it down!". If proposed laws are actually passed it will be more like "if people are discussing stuff on your platform, you better make sure no one comes to harm or else!"
In my view this is a sea change. Pretty soon we may no longer be able to discuss a wide range of subjects on mainstream platforms (such as psychological or health issues for instance). Kids in particular will be severely restricted in who they can talk to about what. In some cases it may prevent harm. In other cases it could be catastrophic.
If the balance moves so dramatically in one direction, I think it is ony reasonable to think about how to mitigate the effects of this to preserve some freedoms and escape hatches. The efforts I see are very very feeble anyway compared to the full force of what we are facing politically.
In my view, no control should ever be total, even if on the whole we cannot wish for a total loss of control.
It would be great to be able to create one identity that if I want to leave an instance and bring all my data with me to a new instance I can do so without friction. That's currently a big issue I have with Matrix for example -- there's no way for me to go from @user:matrix.org to @user:myowndomain.com and have that be the same identity with the same friends list, etc.
> Remember, your private key is your identity in Nostr, so if it is compromised you'll lose your followers and will have to start from scratch rebuilding your identity.
This is the same gripe I have with home servers on the fediverse: home servers come and go, and private keys sometimes need rotating. Making you lose all your friends and content when that happens is not an acceptable tradeoff.
I think the solution is entirely separating "identity" from every single other concern such as security (private keys), hosting (home servers), and public identity ("display name").
I'm not sure you can separate it from security (private keys). If there's nothing stopping others from using the same identity then it's not _your_ identity.
Nostr is just going in circles with federated networks all over again.
Clients don’t connect to peers on nostr. They connect to relays.
Relays are not intended to connect with each other. Clients send notes to relays. Relays store notes and send them back to clients.
I think federated projects really look at federation as an add on to their platform, not a core feature. E-Mail did this well where everything was automatically federated by default (I.e you can send email from anywhere to anywhere for the most part) whereas some fediverse software, specifically lemmy, require that federation be enabled (and I believe you choose to federate with servers on a per-server basis).
Where I work we're working on a solution to this where your identity remains sovereign between servers [1]. We currently have a Twitter-esque microblogging demo setup [2].
With email, it doesn't really matter if someone is using your email platform to spread controversial political ideas or using it to share pirated media or whatever, because you're not hosting it for the general public to consume.
With the fediverse it's different. If I own fedifoo.app and allow my app to federate with neonazis.app or tankies.app, then eventually neonazi or tankie content will be accessible at fedifoo.app/c/unpleasantcommunity. I don't want that, so I defederate, but now the fediverse is fractured and "it doesn't really matter which instance you choose" is no longer true.
Disabling federation by default helps protect new hosters from the unintended consequences of federation, which is good, but it leaves us starting out on a fractured footing.
Then you don't have to host anything you don't want to but you still have a unified network.
The key is to never let anything like a central party impose censorship that can't be overruled by the user, but still allow them to filter out 99% of the crap by default.
I think many people are just very authoritarian today, and don’t appreciate the internet as we knew it 20 years ago. They’re not content to control how they interact with the internet. They want to control how everyone interacts.
Second, it appears they have even more moderators than the instances with which they defederated. More than enough to keep illegal content off the instance. But that’s not the intended goal. They want content off the instance which is ideologically opposed to the owner. They make that clear in the instance description. They want more moderation than Reddit, which is already filled with insular ideological spaces.
The users are all very much on board with this ideological purity. They freely admit it, so I’m not sure why you would contend it.
It’s 400. Versus over 3000 linked instances. That does not sound like an insanely long list, considering how many spam instances there are and those with questionable content.
I don’t understand how this argues against my premise. This is decisive evidence that they want strict ideological adherence.
The type of person who we want as moderator don't want to be moderators. A real decentral solution needs to give power and sovereignty to the users and take it away from admins and moderators. Some group of elite privileged few federated servers with all the power, demonstrates how worthless Lemmy and fediverse are.
But they also broke the back button
Seems like something they’re thinking about solving.
You keep using the word 'fediverse'. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The whole point of a 'fediverse' is that there isn't a central authority for accounts. That an account on any of the federated systems is an equal participant in the system. That spinning up your own federated host to issue accounts is allowed.
It could be a federated layer of identity & personal content decoupled from social platforms.
And when users host things they give of their own resources to other users, which means there is trust involved. And whenever trust is involved we need a better insight into who signs up. For example; request access with a bio, or a donation.
The other reason is that what you describe is centralized authentication, to a decentralized backend, so it defeats the purpose. Who owns the authentication?
If we want freedom from a corporate internet, we'll just have to bite the bullet and accept a certain learning curve.
Which is also why the centralized corporate services will never go away, and most likely remain a majority.
If you choose control then you end up with the fediverse, because there is no such thing as the "one big fediverse" if every moderator makes different decisions.
Sounds like centralization. Now if Activity Pub goes rouge ALL instances are affected.
Making accounts on your favorite instance and communicating with other instances prevents this, in theory. You may need to make a new account if Lemmy dies but you should (again in theory) be able to move your content seemlessly to a new instance. Becsuse Lemmy isn't facilitating the content, simply providing a view for itz based on its usage of ActivityPub's API
The problem with that was that email addresses are easily forged and Usenet lacked adequate spam filtering and content moderation tools because of its decentralized nature and the general lack of effective spam filtering in the late 90s/early 00s. So it was replaced by forums which were in turn replaced by social media.
There's no guarantee that [email protected] is going to stick around forever, but there was a contract relationship plus a certain degree of too-big-to-fail-ness.
OK, but I've read this exact same complaint and ensuing discussion every time the topic comes up, multiple dozens of times now because all many people here can talk about is how Elon is ruining twitter (ok, that and how C has undefined behavior). It's becoming copypasta.
Since how you join the Fediverse is not going to change in this incarnation any time soon, I'd frankly rather read about the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
This is the fundamental tradeoff. What you are asking for cannot be done and still be federated. Sorry.
The problem is that "federation" has only a small technical component; the majority of the "federation" problem is social not technical.
The social problem is "Bad actors exist. 1) How do I identify them? and 2) How do I extend or revoke trust?"
Even email, which everybody holds up as "federated", hits this problem and defers to centralization. For email, we anoint the DNS records as the primary repository of "identity" and are what are used to extend "trust" via DKIM, DMARC, and SPF.
Can't you use a torrent-like discovery system for users?
I am able to
Follow anyone
Comment on any peertube video
Comment, follow, reply anyone on mastodon, pixelfed
I can reply to anyone on Lemmy or kbin
You will only need an account if you want to post original content on a particular instance, like if you want to upload a video on peertube or pixelfed or Lemmy. For the most part, users are consumers so they WILL only need just a single account
It could be better but its not like something doesn't exist
Being federated doesn't solve the problem of decentralization because it's specifically a middle-ground. It's supposed to be a compromise with some benefits of both centralization and decentralization - and I think a lot of people are happy with that compromise.
You sign up for the moderation you want, and if it or you changes you can jump ship while being able to retain connections (trust me, I've seen several users having migrated instances).
What's great about the Fediverse is that you not only sign up for the network, but the point you start from inside it, and the moderation you want. On a fully decentralized platform you'd either be subject to some form of easily gameable group-moderation or be left to the task of filtering content all by yourself.
I don't care that I might be missing out on some maybe nice person on a instance defederated on my home instance. I care that I feel that I belong on my home instance and my feeds are full of people whose community I can feel like I belong to as well. One that has been very easy to grow organically without an algorithm telling me what I want.
Every time I've brought up that content federation and identity federation aren't the same thing and that having centralized IDPs handle the burden of keeping spammers out of the network, people chime in with "yeah, and don't limit me to google and facebook!" and kind of miss the whole point. Centralized is one of the few solutions to the spam problem, it's worked with email for example. The other ways are some kind of a reputation web (finicky and gameable) or to force people to put down cold hard cash (proof of stake/proof of work).
This is all intimately tied up with crypto and email spam because this same problem hasn't been solved for 30+ years and keeps popping up over and over again. Reputation networks are hard.
(and, you can do identity federation without actually melding your content with theirs, and that in fact melding content into a global namespace isn't inherently desirable. There there may be cases where you want to do something different with the "domain"/"subreddit" than another instance, or what most other people are doing with that domain/subreddit - they don't get to tell you what to do with your board.)
But yes generally speaking the real problem here is there's like 10 different factions that all want to solve slightly different use-cases. Some people want self-hosted reddit, some people want self-hosted reddit with global boards, some people want explicit networking to specific instances, some people want something much closer to the decentralized/single-person instance with individual custom IDPs, etc. Nobody even agrees what they want to build.
Or "china" (porcelain) versus "china" (a band) versus "china" (one, possibly two countries) etc.
One option would be an explicit mapping step:
1. Communities are only able to stake out boring UUIDs, those are the only official ID and are used in any invites, links, etc.
2. Instances may choose to suggest a "foo"->UUID link for users on that instance
3. Users may choose to override that "foo"->UUID link within their own settings if they disagree
4. When a user references community "foo", what actually gets shared is a link based on their current mapping settings.
5. If someone else sees that link and their settings designate a different "foo", the link should render in a way that makes it obvious that it refers to something contradictory.
Yeah, it's complicated UX-wise, but the thing is it's actually closer to the underlying reality of how humans use names: There is no single global and timeless "Bob Smith", there's just one in a given context between me and whomever I'm talking to.
It's the opposite of user choice/power and, ironically, less flexible than reddit in some respects.
People are fundamentally misunderstanding thier needs and how they can be properly implemented.
It includes 3 years of free hosting for your domain name, a small web server, and a sync service that copies your files to a central server so they can be made available at that domain name. The default server would be the company that made the product, but you would own the domain, and you'd be able to change where you're syncing to with two clicks. And the canonical version of your files would always live locally (one-way sync).
Could be used for email, website hosting, and local media server capabilities. Throw some solar panels on it, and boom, you have my dream device.
Just host one instance, use it only for managing your identity, and tada! you've exactly what you wanted.
You can also log in through any instance, including localhost. Links also work on any server because they include a capability to the content in the link.
This is the beauty of content addressing plus public key based addressing.