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Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic verification based on a private key held by the user, so that they can prove to other servers/users that
by bondarchuk 4y ago
Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic verification based on a private key held by the user, so that they can prove to other servers/users that they are the same account as one that existed on a server that has shut down already? Is there something like that in Mastodon?
- Kye 4y agoI think most people in this situation do the same thing people do on Twitter when it suspends an account for nonsense reasons like telling a Nazi to eat paste: make another, make a post, share it with a few friends off Twitter/Mastodon, have them RT/boost to circulate it within their circles. This seems to work pretty well. Cryptographic certainty is fun to think about, but sometimes you just need people.
- KvanteKat 4y agoIt doesn't involve cryptography, but mastodon has for at least a couple of years supported link-verification in profiles (it basically checks if a link back to your mastodon profile exists on a page linked on your profile), so a linking to a page that only you credibly control (say, a personal website) is the de-facto system of decentralized user-verification on mastodon. Edit: supported since 2018 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8703 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8703
- jefftk 4y agoIt does sort of involve crypto: if the page you control weren't served over HTTPS it wouldn't be too hard (DNS poisoning) for someone else to trick a server into verifying the wrong user.