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Yep, this person nails the primary issue. Distributed or federated social networking won’t take off until we have a worthwhile self-sovereign identity solution,
by camdenlock 4y ago
Yep, this person nails the primary issue. Distributed or federated social networking won’t take off until we have a worthwhile self-sovereign identity solution, aka BYOID (Bring Your Own Identity), where the sole controller of the identity is the individual with the private key.
It’s a very difficult problem to solve and to turn into something easy to use for the masses… but it’s required for such applications as Mastodon to truly be enticing.
As-is, we should not expect Mastodon (or similar systems) to gain much traction outside of a few niches.
- viraptor 4y ago> where the sole controller of the identity is the individual with the private key Counterpoint: People at large don't care about managing credentials the same way IT geeks do. The federated approach with admins and "lost password" flow helps adoption more than something like Scuttlebutt does. Private key as identity means "lose this and your identity is irrecoverable". We've seen this play out many times with people losing significant amounts of money in crypto. We'd see many more mistakes with low stakes social networks.
- _carbyau_ 4y agoI think similar. My take it that a DNS equivalent service needs to accept anyone to register a public key, for free : IE allow anyone to register [public key].subdomain.domain.com And the registration/update tests you have the private key for that. But: 1. as sibling comment noted. We need really good key management for that too. 2. how to run such a service with all the complications (like trolls trying to brute force register everything they can) 3. how to fund it Then everyone hosts their own anything. As an app on their phone. As a server at home or ISP or dedicated hosting service.