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Domain names are very, very useful. But with regard to activitypub, if a server wants to change its name the federation and social graph is broken entirely. Eve
by betwixthewires 5y ago
Domain names are very, very useful. But with regard to activitypub, if a server wants to change its name the federation and social graph is broken entirely. Even if your server goes down and needs to be rebuilt, federation gets broken due to this design decision, because other servers don't know you're offline and new status messages get lost.
It is a brittle point of failure in activitypub.
- rtpg 5y agoI guess “domain name change” seems like a much more manageable thing than “IP address change” (I don’t believe IP addresses are portable between hosts?) I think I understand better what you’re saying though
- betwixthewires 5y agoWell so if servers were able to identify themselves to each other using a public key, they could change domains whenever they wanted and just update the others with a signed message. You'd still use DNS to navigate, for user identifiers, but a change wouldn't break federation. Unfortunately this is not in the spec and it is a bit involved to do.