3 ms·

I'm using branle (https://branle.fiatjaf.com/ https://branle.fiatjaf.com/) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab

• swalsh 5y ago
  Just checked it out, my pub key is f0bed2e11260f0f77f781db928f40a34c18713fda1918d3be996f91d0776e985 it's not obvious to me though how you find people to follow.
  • wbobeirne 5y ago
    You find their pubkey in HN threads, of course.
  • kseistrup 5y ago
    Lack of discoverability is often a weak spot of decentralized social networks that don't have a public firehose. Secure Scuttlebutt, Twtxt, Bogbook — and now Nostr — all suffer from this, and new users end up looking at an empty timeline and shouting into the dark.
• webmaven 5y ago
  > I'm using branle (https://branle.fiatjaf.com/ https://branle.fiatjaf.com/) as my client and you can follow me with my pubkey: 22e804d26ed16b68db5259e78449e96dab5d464c8f470bda3eb1a70467f2c793. It isn't too hard to improve upon the status quo in various ways when you just drop a key usability requirement (in this case, the need for human-memorable 'handles'). It is worth reading 'Why Johnny Can't Encrypt' (1999) [0], 'Why Johnny Still Can't Encrypt' (2011) [1], and 'Why Johnny Still, Still Can't Encrypt' (2015) [2]. [0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec99/full_papers/whitten/whitten_html/index.html https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec99/full_papers/whitt... [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.227.7902&rep=rep1&type=pdf https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.22... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08555 https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08555
  • vidarh 5y ago
    That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the server side. E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful for more than this. If people want mastodon style handles, for example, it's easy enough to create a mapping that can leverage DNS for example to let you query for a matching pubkey in a cacheable and easily scalable way and without the need for that to be built into the messaging protocol.
    • webmaven 5y ago
      > That's true, but you can disconnect those requirements on the server side. > E.g. a "name/profile to key/value" service would be useful for more than this. At which point you've reintroduced a global namespace SPOF that is vulnerable to censorship, etc. You can push the complexity around like food on a plate, but getting rid of it is another matter entirely.
      • fiatjaf 5y ago
        No, you don't. You can have DNS-based aliases to pubkeys, and then people will follow pubkeys and interact with pubkeys, not with the DNS aliases. So if these users are censored later from the DNS then they still keep their identity, their contacts, their followers etc.
        • pseudozach 5y ago
          You could even deterministically map pubkeys to handles with something like bip39. it won't be pretty but it will be unique, human-readable and uncensorable.
        • webmaven 5y ago
          That's kind of like saying that people don't interact with domain names, but with IP addresses. The point of having the mapping of a name to a key is for users to use it in place of the underlying key in their interactions with the system.
• makeworld 5y ago
  If ed25519 was used instead of secp256k1, wouldn't pubkeys be shorter? Like SSB.
  • swalsh 5y ago
    One of the neat things about the way they've done it, is you can use a bitcoin wallet to connect: https://twitter.com/Bumi/status/1476957006653276170 https://twitter.com/Bumi/status/1476957006653276170
• speedgoose 5y ago
  You may know it already but "branle" means jerking off in French.