@evan I know that @mike is working on nomadic identity. I've tried out Hubzilla and Streams. From what I see, there's been little adoption on what he's working on despite it being available for years.
I hope the Fediverse Identity Manager means Bluesky is meaningless.
But I also wonder if people who use Mastodon will know about it.
We need something to make Bluesky's nomadic identity superfluous.
One proposed solution for nomadic identity was proposed in the #FriendlyForgeFormat discussions where a sort of link between old and new identities (or indeed, any of one's identities) would allow for a more seamlessly user experience.
@reiver
This is news for me as well. But we can imitate what ATP is doing that is also backwards compatible. First allow "BYO addr URI". Then include DID in the WebFinger doc. The user will update the canonical HTTP URI upon migration. This handles the ID problem. @gvlx@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews
I echo that worry - having to leave posts behind when migrating - and add to it another:
The situation where you click on a post and you don't see all the replies, unless you go to its original location on its original instance. Then of course you can't interact with it (or the new replies you've now found) from there.
I also think using your own domain for your ActivityPub identity makes this a lot easier. I'd compare changing web hosting or blog platforms.
But it's hard to use your own domain on the fediverse today. You have to run your own server. It should be easier.
Also, this is functionality that is completely unavailable on the commercial social web. You can't move your Twitter account to Instagram, or your LinkedIn to TikTok.
@evan@sarajw@fediversenews That's true. To that point, I believe decentralization of social media is more likely now than it was a year ago, and it will ultimately win.
But to your other point, it will take that much longer if there's a war between protocols.
So if ActivityPub is to win quickly, it needs to kill AT protocol's one (theoretical) advantage.
I meant, an architecture that made nomadic identity easy, at the cost of making everyday delivery hard or slow, would not be a good architecture. It's dragging down the frequent tasks in order to optimize a very infrequent task.
I think content addressing would be an example of this kind of architecture.
Comparing the incidental moves to another instance, with the millions of toots posted every day. The moves should indeed not drag down the posts.
But a distributed environment requires the ability to move. There are too many instances whose continuity isn't guaranteed for a long period.
If we believe in a situation where people can choose a preferred instance, then we have to ensure that they don't lose everything when that instance is discontinued.
Can there be a stopgap of downloading your content then uploading the package to an account on a new instance? If migrating it all online is such a traffic challenge?
I guess there'd have to be some proof that you are indeed the owner of that content package...
Edit to add: WhatsApp backs up your message archive on Google drive for transferring between phones.
I realise there's still traffic with the down/upload but maybe it's an option 🤷
If we're now onboarding to large "official" instances because that makes it easier (incidentally I think that's a good idea) with the argument that moving later on is easy - well it is, but leaving those posts behind is jarring.
I would possibly make a jump again soon, if it wasn't for the fact I'm quite attached to my history and content where I am now. I even have a second account on another instance already.
@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews no that’s bullshit – moving accounts is something I do every time I get completely fucked off with some situation or other that pisses me off, and that’s much more than “a handful of times” in my life, it’s often
Anyway, consider this:
Do you know the admins of your instance? Have they ever spoken to you? Have they ever joined in and replied to a post you’ve made? That’s happened to me a few times and it’s jarring and uncomfortable
Do you know the admins of your email provider? The admins of your gmail account? Of course not. They keep the fuck out of your usage of the internet
I’ve moved several times not just because I got pissed off with something but because I was aware that admins or mods existed and are probably reading my stuff which modified my approach to posting anything at all
If it were easier to move yet keep my identity I’d basically try all the instances on all the fediverses until I found one I was comfortable with
I deleted my accounts on mastodon social and mastodon cloud (horrid place) because I was so furious one night I couldn’t be arsed to even try to move from one place to another, I just dumped the accounts both at once and announced I was leaving the fediverse
@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews I should point out that it’s never occurred to me that I should want to take my posts with me – they’re not that important, nobody’s posts are in any way that important, if anyone posts something I like and I bookmark, it’s not that important, if I post anything at all, it’s not that important, and if you’re reading this, your posts are not that important
Especially in situations where a group of us are live-posting along with something we’re watching on telly (which happens every Friday evening with Top of the Pops on BBC4 here in the UK) – loads of posts which only make sense to others also sharing the same primitive hashtag mechanism and frantically updating constantly, posts which are just responses to what we’re seeing on the telly, posts that cannot possibly be contextualised if you’re not in with us, and posts that mean nothing the next day – I don’t care about posts like that, I don’t want to take them with me anywhere, if there were a way of setting their lifetime to 1 week, I’d do it (a way that is a] apparent to me without having to look for it, b] doesn’t just apply itself to every post I make, and d] can be applied to only those posts I’m making while watching telly along with other people also watching the same thing that evening)
Which sometimes makes me wonder if we should be using some form of fediverse chat room? Maybe we should
In which case, sure, yes, let’s do that – but! I will not want to sign up a new account just for that, nobody would find me, I’d not find anyone else I’m used to, what I do want to do is use my existing fediverse login to login to that hypothetical chat room as well as be logged in to the mastodon instance I’m using – both the same login, both the same identity, different usage
That’s one thing I’d use a movable identity for – being on a microblobbying service like mastodon or clakckey, and also simultaneously and at the same time, being on a chat service like something that doesn’t exist yet, but as the same person, same ID, same way of getting to me (ie, like as if I’d used my email address as the ID to all of this) (and in a world that you could trust that nobody would spam my email address just because I make it available out in the open) (which probably isn’t this world)
@CodexArcanum@evan@atomicpoet the more I think about it the more I see that having an independent and movable identity isn’t actually so much of value in moving from one instance to another (although yes, that can be made possible with such a thing), it’s in being on more than one instance at the same time where those instances serve different purposes, or are different kinds of thing altogether
This nomadic posts feature remember me the first instance I Ianded on which, during november 2022, suggested people to set an automatic expire for posts .
I'm curious how is supposed to work.
What happen if I migrate 10 years of my posts (I've got a nice html twitter archive with local search built in) from instance A to instance B ?
Will that affect also the local copies on all the other ten thousands of servers ?
And why do we need to move all those messages if they are already present in multiple copies on the network ?
Would that need being superseded by a really working fediverse search feature?
@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews I started thinking about this a while ago, before I’d got around to reading the Bluesky AT Protocol docs. They have solutions for some of this (all a user’s data is a single, digitally signed blob that can be easily synced and moved), but importantly do NOT have a working solution for the nomadic identity part.
By the way, let's say you want to migrate.
Your social contacts already read your old messages, which they are cached in their server and in their memory.
If i remember that Kevin told me something on may 2023, i can try to search it, either searching for me or searching for past you, but the generic instance usually suck ad digging in the past.
We're no Shakespeare and if we are, we publish books.
Who's the only person interested in my whole historic posts on a social network?
It's me, locally, on my pc, to search something i remember i have wrote and i want to occasionally rephrase/repost.
I must confess i once posted on the fediverse some revised considerations i previously made on closed social network, to see if i can have different feedback from different new people.
@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews Some of the AT design decisions are interesting. In particular the PDS, which is the whole of a user’s “account”. It’s a digitally signed and hashed merkle tree of data containing everything - posts, likes, reposts, the lot. It’s easy to sync across between servers and your client is expected to keep a complete copy as well. But, it’s public. Anyone can download it.
@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews That’s probably why they haven’t worked out how to implement DMs yet. This will be a very hard problem to solve involving encryption and keeping track of rolling public/private keys.
They’ll need to give a lot of thought to protecting against offline brute force decryption of “private” data.
@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews Also, as far as I can tell the “Placeholder DID” requires a central directory service run by Bluesky that is the only way of allocating DIDs currently and for looking them up again to find out which server has the user’s PDS. The “real” DID will probably turn out to be a blockchain solution. Essentially NFTs. That’s going to go down well.
@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet@fediversenews The public nature of the PDS data store of course means full text search of the whole thing is not only possible, but impossible to prevent.
@MetalSamurai@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet Thank you, I finally understood it even if I’m not a tech expert! I was thinking about something like a placeholder post and when you click on it it redirects to the original post in the old instance but if the instance is dead? You finally made me clear that it’s a very complicated issue!
@megsmagik@luca@evan@sarajw@atomicpoet It’s not impossible to do. In fact one of the creators of ActivityPub put some thought into this a few years ago, but I don’t think the work has gone anywhere.
I don't know a lot about how masto.host works, but I think that's a great model for setting up an enduring place in the fediverse.
I also think it'd be possible for a multi-user installation to treat accounts as if they're on different domains. I'd compare how GitHub pages handles custom domains.
@evan with respect to the difficulty of using your own domain in the fedi being too complicated...
Two apporaches could be taken to address the complexity:
devise a means to separate identities from servers which the Blooski Crew are consumed with doing (by way of excess reinvention at that), or
make a concerted effort to focus on easily installed and maintained servers by re-prioritizing simplicity over scalability
Anyways I think there is a lot of hand-wringing about making One Account for All The Things and OMG what if our online selves are fragmented amongst many services? This seems to be the BS obsession.
But that is fine! It is fine to have 3 masto accounts, 2 pixelfeds and a peertube if you want! Lets make it easier to do that by making SSO services link to these accounts easier...like the LemonLDAP portal concept but really slimmed down or something.
I dunno...it just seems to me that a lot of effort is put into simplifying things "the wrong way"?
The situation where you click on a post and you don't see all the replies, unless you go to its original location on its original instance. Then of course you can't interact with it (or the new replies you've now found) from there.
That's also a solved problem. It's called OpenWebAuth and it's been around for years.
Another issue that is somewhat palliated by alternative frontends, but not completely. Some apps such as #Fedilab go and fetch the data from the original instance - why can’t the Mastodon UI do the same?
@csolisr@evan@atomicpoet@fediversenews Even if you could migrate the posts, Mastodon would have to make concessions re backfilling accounts or posts would only be visible on the new server. Seems like they should sort both issues imo.
Mastodon already supports setting accounts as migrated elsewhere, what seems to be left is for the old server to automatically redirect posts to the new server.
@csolisr@evan@atomicpoet@fediversenews I mean that federated instances don’t pull history on accounts (which they absolutely should do). If you start a new server it’s fairly useless for the first few weeks until you’re following people.
If you migrated old posts I think you’d (currently) have the same problem in reverse, where even if you can see them that other mastodon instances never check they exist
@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews I wonder how important it is to migrate previous post. Do people really dive back in time to go read old toots? There's no good UI to do it anyway (ex: a calendar view where I could access my toots from 2019 easily) so what's the point if they don't migrate? 🤔
My ideal solution would be to have an easily readable archive of my toots, (shown on a calendar) that only me can read. And then my public toots are limited to only X months.
@narF@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews I was lead to believe one of the features of these new social networks is posts are ephemeral. I like the idea of them being deleted after 90 or so days myself.
A personal archive might be a nice feature though.
@skotchygut@narF@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews
It's important to me the whole spirit of the Fediverse ie. quickly and seamlessly moving servers. Understanding the 'as is' status, I'm waiting for it to stabilise
I think it needs a bit of discussion on future scope -
Top-line posts only (as now afaik)
Media files, where possible?
Replies, DMs etc?
Even better would be user-selectivity ie review one's top-line posts and markup those for transfer in some way
I think Mastodon implemented the option last year to auto-delete posts after X days. But me personally, I would prefer them to be "archived" so that only me can read them. And maybe I could select some of them to become "permanent" (visible to all)
@narF this is a great idea. the reason I standardized on micro.blog for my posting needs is because I can auto delete on masto and after a while my posts are only on micro.blog / my personal blog. Not 100 percent invisible but a lot more work to go find something old and be a jerk about it.
@narF@evan@atomicpoet@fediversenews I know pleroma supported deleting them. If I wanted to archive then I’d probably setup some kind of a scraper script on a cron job to follow my account and perform that operation.
@skotchygut I mean, yeah, it's hackable. And you can also just download your account archive instead of making a scraper. But then reading the content isn't easy. It's just a massive json with no UI.
Gotta agree with the Mustachioed One on this: Bluesky is out to monetize the protocol. I designed similar decentralized systems a number of years back (in my more heavily-capitalist days) and bolt-on services like external moderation was exactly the model I landed on for monetizing decentralized systems.
Create an indispensable, optional service
Absorb or starve competition
Maximize the take now that you've become a defacto standard and monopoly
@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews He's probably right and this might be a good opportunity for mastodon and other people & teams who work on fediverse to observe the weak points within activitypub & apps and see how improvement could be possible. I believe mr evan prodromou is already on it, if i'm not mistaken
If I see how much Calckey can do with #ActivityPub, then I see no other reason for BlueSky to not use the W3C standard other than to enforce another big business model upon users.
Dorsey has been very clear about how he expects to earn money with BlueSky and he could not do the same when he would simply integrate with a standard that was already accepted by many.
@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews I am not sure what anyone thinks that Bluesky is solving. It's still a silo, if a slightly nicer one. And it's helmed by Jack “Elon might be the only thing that can save Twitter” Dorsey, who you can pretty directly point to twitter's demise. All that said, getting on the fediverse needs to be this easy. If it were, Bluesky would be DOA.
@atomicpoet@evan I understand the stated goals of the project, but I don't trust how it will be implemented/executed. Notably absent from the official site is how they plan to monetize, for example.
@charlesesmith@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews as far as I can tell it’s solving the problem of Jack and his friends needing the next company to grow and sell for another payday.
@atomicpoet
I think @evan may be more pragmatic than the post might make it seem. FWIW I think his take is accurate, & suspect Jack at least (perhaps not Jay & others) has literal contempt for genuinely open efforts.
That said I think I've also seen Evan say he's happy to work on bridges. (Which arguably defang AT.)
@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews Indeed, it's silly to create your own standard unless you're trying to accomplish something significantly different or significantly improved from the existing one. Right now a single app has chosen an incompatible federation protocol they wrote themselves.
@atomicpoet@evan@fediversenews I’d be rather inclined to agree with his take, the only sensible approach for Jack here would’ve been to make it ActivityPub compliant. It’s a bad ploy at competition, in a space where competition doesn’t make sense
For people who do not see the activism in this. Chicken and egg - we already have the egg - it's the #fedivers now can we nurture this to hatch a chicken. Or will our egg be stolen by magpies - see our #fahernistas making a mess of the "protocol wars" on this subject.
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