Once in a while I have #hunches about a software system that keep nagging at me, and over time it usually becomes clearer why something has been bothering me.
Tonight’s moment of clarity is that there is a fundamental problem with the #Fediverse, and it is that SERVERS CONTINUE TO OWN MY IDENTITY ON THE NETWORK. They may not be commercial servers, but they are still someone else’s computers over which I have little control.
Moving between servers is a high-friction activity: I lose all my posts and all my friends. Sure, I can reimport those lists in my new home, but my friends would have to rely on a forwarding note I left in my previous server to find me. I sure hope that old server won’t block my friends or go out of service, because then they’ll never find me.
@drahardja there have been various proposals for how to fix that, in various contexts, from DIDs as identifiers to the Zot protocol. Personally my preference would be to have multi-tenant ActivityPub servers where each tenant could have their own domain name: if you want to move servers, you can do so transparently.
@drahardja@J12t that’s a rather blanket statement :-) Not true for me, not true for many of my friends, and who knows how true it would be for which segments of the general public if domain ownership actually came with understandable benefits — which admittedly so far it doesn’t.
@J12t Out of the 12 million users of the Fediverse today, how many do you think will be interested in maintaining a domain, rather than just leave and join Bluesky?
@drahardja@J12t … whose business model is … selling domain names! One wonders why …. But as I said, that’s just my preference, there are many other proposed solutions with different tradeoffs. In any case there is zooko’s triangle to mind. In the end, I’m happy with whatever gets implemented first and the fediverse certainly can use help on this and many other issues, somebody just needs to rally the troups and get it done. Maybe you are?
@J12t Sorry, didn’t mean to be snarky with my replies. Domain ownership could be one way to prove identity, but I think it should be an advanced option. For most people, I think establishing a cryptographic presence that can be unlocked with a username/password would be the easiest transition.
On the #Fediverse, SERVERS CONTINUE TO CONSTRAIN MY AUTONOMY. Finding the “right” server becomes a high-stakes game for newcomers. I don’t have numbers, but I suspect that users would rather quit the Fediverse entirely rather than relocate their presence to another server when their first one turns out to be bad, because the experience is such a cognitively expensive exercise, and there’s always the looming threat that the next server is going to be just as bad, and they’d have to repeat the process over again.
I think #ActivityPub conflates the idea of servers as communication nodes on the network between which packets are sent, and servers as the means of identifying users on the network.
Users need IDENTITY PORTABILITY on the Fediverse, where their presence can be easily transported between one server and the next, and their state entirely restored wherever they go, without needing previous servers leaving breadcrumbs in order for friends to find them in their new home.
This may seem like trading off one complexity for another—a username/password for, say a cryptographic key or some sort of federated identity—but I think having ownership of one’s identity, and being able to pack up your entire presence in a duffel bag and take it somewhere else will bring us one step to a social network made for the PEOPLE, not the nerds.
@drahardja I wish I could find the talk. The Blockchain is a good data structure for low-trust shared data. It is rare that such cases exist, but I think this is one. Their model was to store only your identity on the chain, not all data. In theory, you'd only need to update the chain when you modify your identity.
@drahardja If you disconnect your identity from the app (that’s running on a server) you can also have one identity for many apps (or services).
Want pixelfed? Join, same identity. Kbin? Video? Some TikTok copy when that arrives? Same identity.
Don’t like your mastodon server? Move to another and keep the identity. Don’t like your identity? Migrate to another (only time one would have to translate them).
These are things I’d ask for at least. No guarantee that they are good:)
@drahardja Absolutely agree. There are some technical and social hurdles to overcome, since what you’re describing is almost exactly how Nostr works.
However, having a separate identity under your control which each server references is a great target… but I do worry about people who lose password and logins regularly (like my aunt). Ultimately, we probably need a separate system for creating a federated identités from how those identities are used… but even that would require someone else to help you in the failure cases… or leave you stranded in them.
I’m not sure what the right solution is, but we’re definitely not there yet
@drahardja Have you looked at Hubzilla? It handles this very well, although since it's written to use a different protocol and only has ActivityPub as an add-on it doesn't always play so well with other ActivityPub-based Fediverse apps (like Mastodon)
@drahardja being part of a community always has some costs and it is unfair to put those costs purely on the volunteer community operators.
I think if you take a step back and look at the bigger picture, you will realise that your comment is not much different from someone that complaints that they can't just easily take all their stuff and move into the woods.
Sure, nomadic identity and account portability are nice ideas, but they also devalue communities if it is too easy for people just pack up there stuff and abandon them.
Obviously I am against holding people hostage, but the Fediverse is a network of communities and a lot of the vital inbuilt assumptions rest on a shared responsibility of all participants, and having some friction to make people stick to their servers and hold other people responsible for their conduct as members of those servers is vital for the network to thrive.
The main hassle with changing servers, for me, was re-following everyone. That ought to be improved by being able to export a follow list and import it on a new server. An automated way to notify people who followed you that your server changed would also be useful.
(Maybe this already happens if you change server. I got booted off a server so my experience may have differed.)
@drahardja sorry this is off topic, but I see you were with Apple remember when Apple made the code for the early MacPaint available? I had decompiled it with code warrior, back when code warrior really worked. Then, I compiled it into a java servlet. This was 1998. The servlet allowed all the functions of MacPaint, but you couldn't save to your hard drive: the java version didn't allow that.
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