this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
338 points (99.1% liked)
Fediverse
17710 readers
6 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The fediverse really needs key-signed messages.
As long as accounts reside on one server it fails to accomplish its goals, IMO
The Fediverse's main goal was to be a middle ground between completely centralized and completely decentralized networks, though... So I'd say it has accomplished its goal.
Fair enough if you want to move the goal there it's a score.
I had thought the goal was to remove central control over communication.
AFAIK, the team never defined an official goal.
It's called self sovereign identity. I'm working on it, it's a big change that may be accelerated by eIDAS.
Elaborate?
If posts were signed, it wont matter what instance youre posting from since your identity would be tied to your public key and not the account on a Mastodon/lemmy/etc server.
Thats more decentralized. It helps when you get banned, a server shuts down etc.
Yes, we need another PGP vs S/MIME flame war, it's been so long!
But wouldnβt the public key need to be somewhere to? At some point down the line you will probably have to trust some server.
No, thatβs not how that works.
Users can generate their own keys, and you know itβs the same user as long as they have the same key, even if theyβre on different servers.
No certificate authority is required for this kind of use case.
Ok, but if it's not bound to something like an official domain name how can you be sure the person who signed their posts as president of the EU (or whatever the official title is) to actually be that person is real life?
He's right that the public key would have to be somewhere, maybe on the profile page. The public key would be one more thing to be federated across servers.
It could be shared across instances too. It's not a hard problem.
Fediverse currently has totally centralised takedowns and bans coz it uses the same account-model as Twitter/Facebook
So nostr?
It would be a simple enough feature to code on top of the existing Fediverse
Is there any benefit to it over nostr though? You'd have to link your public key to your account(s) and store a backup of your private key in addition to your regular login/password just to get a more fragmented and less seamless version of nostr. A lot of people already have issues figuring out how fediverse works with multiple instances and all... now they'd have multiple accounts with different credentials to keep track of on top of a meta login/password (pub/priv key). With nostr you only have 1 login/password (pub/priv key) to everything, it's just long and you can't change it. At least I think that's how it works, I don't really use twitter/nostr/mastodon type of sites.
Userbase.
This game is more about mindshare. It's not about technical capabilities. Facebook are technically dismal.
https://stats.nostr.band/
https://the-federation.info/
Nostr is crypto bullshit.