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One huge shortcoming of the Fediverse as currently implemented is that you have to use a different ID for each app, ie tube.jeena.net/@jeena, toot.jeena.net/@je

One huge shortcoming of the Fediverse as currently implemented is that you have to use a different ID for each app, ie tube.jeena.net/@jeena, toot.jeena.net/@jeena, etc. What if you want to use the Mastodon UI to write a comment on a video? Your comment is going to use a different ID than the one you normally use to interact with videos. Given this, what's the point of federating these different apps with each other? We need to figure out a way to share a single id across apps. Could be as simple as having a single URL as your user ID profile, and listing multiple public keys which are used by your various apps. The keys can be rotated as necessary since your URL is still the final authority on control over your identity.

myaccountonhn 3y ago
There is a lot of work being done on this. I personally think initiatives like activiypod and vocata are interesting and would solve it well. They focus on being standard Activitypub implementations that others can subscribe to.
Workaccount2 3y ago
A blockchain might actually be a decent solution for this. Just make it so the tokens don't have value.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  This is impossible, sorry. blockchain is before anything else, a very opinonated implementation of applied economic theory. The technology is secondary and consequent to the belief that people as a whole cannot be trusted to take care of things that they do not pay for. I say this is someone who is far from a fan of blockchain anything, but there's no getting around the fact that it is impossible to divorce it from its core principle, which is that pay to play has to be baked into the system at its deepest foundation. And as soon as you introduce this, pay for the many becomes profit for the few, and inevitably markets, trading, and rent-seeking cartels form who swiftly capture the natural value confluence points of the system, reversing any decentralizing tendencies it may have, and collapsing it back towards centralization in order to consolidate and protect their advantaged position.
- apitman 3y ago
  If all your target users are comfortable with the tradeoffs of systems built on blockchains (ie private key is the source of authority), you're probably looking for Nostr.
  - lovvtide 3y ago
    Nostr is not built on a blockchain
    - apitman 3y ago
      Yeah sorry for those not familiar it probably sounds like I was saying that. I just meant to point out it has some of the same UX tradeoffs.
  - irusensei 3y ago
    For context the only things nostr have in common with Bitcoin is using secp256k1 for identity. It has been cooked mainly by bitcoiners but AFAIK part of the driving force was specifically to avoid the "everything is a blockchain with a native token" situation. Naturally you will find lots of bitcoin people using and developing clients (hence the Lightning integration on most clients) but apparently it has been picking the interest of other groups. There seems to be a thriving Japanese community.
kuchenbecker 3y ago
I don't know enough about the Fediverse, but are those pluggable? I could see having a trusted third party for Identity management.
- apitman 3y ago
  Why have a third party rather than choosing one of your apps to be the "primary"?
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Why add the same functionality to all functions. Doesn't having a single function that handles that. In this case apps.
WolfeReader 3y ago
In practice, federation works _great_ when the apps all have the same basic structure, and gets pretty rough otherwise. Mastodon instances basically _work great_ with each other, and with Friendica and Calckey too, since they have the same Twitter-like structure. Lemmy and Kbin - and all instances thereof - can chat with each other without issue too, since they have the communities + threads structure in common. But trying to get Mastodon and Lemmy to talk to each other is 1. surprisingly possible, and 2. kind of annoying, since they speak the same protocol but have different structures of communication. And never mind other ActivityPub applications like BookWyrm or WriteFreely or PeerTube.
- apitman 3y ago
  Do they really need to work that differently though? It seems to me that almost all of them can be represented as trees of text entries. Blog+comments, HN/reddit threads, Stackoverflow QAs, DMs, Discord/Slack, forums. These are all just text trees with optional attachments and/or links to other content (images and videos etc). Why not build that tree structure into the protocol (all you need is 1 parent and 0+ children for each entry)?
  - WolfeReader 3y ago
    (Using Lemmy+Mastodon as an example) Lemmy has the concept of "communities" - subreddits, basically. On Mastodon, you can follow a Lemmy user and see their posts+comments exactly as you'd expect. And you can follow a community too! To Mastodon's point of view, the community is a single user that "boosts" (re-tweets) every post and every comment made within. So following a moderately active community from Mastodon will absolutely flood your feed with 100% of the community's user activity. Meanwhile, Lemmy doesn't do direct messages or use hashtags as a first-class feature. So if a Mastodon user tries to DM a Lemmy user, or a Lemmy user wants to follow a hashtag, they're out of luck. And again, there are other Fediverse apps with even different models than these. Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab are going to adapt ActivityPub to all federate with each other - this is a huge win, of course - but would we expect someone to make or review a pull request from their BookWyrm account?
  - spadufed 3y ago

myaccountonhn 3y ago

There is a lot of work being done on this. I personally think initiatives like activiypod and vocata are interesting and would solve it well. They focus on being standard Activitypub implementations that others can subscribe to.

Workaccount2 3y ago

A blockchain might actually be a decent solution for this. Just make it so the tokens don't have value.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
This is impossible, sorry. blockchain is before anything else, a very opinonated implementation of applied economic theory. The technology is secondary and consequent to the belief that people as a whole cannot be trusted to take care of things that they do not pay for. I say this is someone who is far from a fan of blockchain anything, but there's no getting around the fact that it is impossible to divorce it from its core principle, which is that pay to play has to be baked into the system at its deepest foundation. And as soon as you introduce this, pay for the many becomes profit for the few, and inevitably markets, trading, and rent-seeking cartels form who swiftly capture the natural value confluence points of the system, reversing any decentralizing tendencies it may have, and collapsing it back towards centralization in order to consolidate and protect their advantaged position.
apitman 3y ago
If all your target users are comfortable with the tradeoffs of systems built on blockchains (ie private key is the source of authority), you're probably looking for Nostr.
- lovvtide 3y ago
  Nostr is not built on a blockchain
  - apitman 3y ago
    Yeah sorry for those not familiar it probably sounds like I was saying that. I just meant to point out it has some of the same UX tradeoffs.
- irusensei 3y ago
  For context the only things nostr have in common with Bitcoin is using secp256k1 for identity. It has been cooked mainly by bitcoiners but AFAIK part of the driving force was specifically to avoid the "everything is a blockchain with a native token" situation. Naturally you will find lots of bitcoin people using and developing clients (hence the Lightning integration on most clients) but apparently it has been picking the interest of other groups. There seems to be a thriving Japanese community.

kuchenbecker 3y ago

I don't know enough about the Fediverse, but are those pluggable? I could see having a trusted third party for Identity management.

apitman 3y ago
Why have a third party rather than choosing one of your apps to be the "primary"?
- ipaddr 3y ago
  Why add the same functionality to all functions. Doesn't having a single function that handles that. In this case apps.

WolfeReader 3y ago

In practice, federation works _great_ when the apps all have the same basic structure, and gets pretty rough otherwise. Mastodon instances basically _work great_ with each other, and with Friendica and Calckey too, since they have the same Twitter-like structure. Lemmy and Kbin - and all instances thereof - can chat with each other without issue too, since they have the communities + threads structure in common. But trying to get Mastodon and Lemmy to talk to each other is 1. surprisingly possible, and 2. kind of annoying, since they speak the same protocol but have different structures of communication. And never mind other ActivityPub applications like BookWyrm or WriteFreely or PeerTube.

apitman 3y ago
Do they really need to work that differently though? It seems to me that almost all of them can be represented as trees of text entries. Blog+comments, HN/reddit threads, Stackoverflow QAs, DMs, Discord/Slack, forums. These are all just text trees with optional attachments and/or links to other content (images and videos etc). Why not build that tree structure into the protocol (all you need is 1 parent and 0+ children for each entry)?
- WolfeReader 3y ago
  (Using Lemmy+Mastodon as an example) Lemmy has the concept of "communities" - subreddits, basically. On Mastodon, you can follow a Lemmy user and see their posts+comments exactly as you'd expect. And you can follow a community too! To Mastodon's point of view, the community is a single user that "boosts" (re-tweets) every post and every comment made within. So following a moderately active community from Mastodon will absolutely flood your feed with 100% of the community's user activity. Meanwhile, Lemmy doesn't do direct messages or use hashtags as a first-class feature. So if a Mastodon user tries to DM a Lemmy user, or a Lemmy user wants to follow a hashtag, they're out of luck. And again, there are other Fediverse apps with even different models than these. Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab are going to adapt ActivityPub to all federate with each other - this is a huge win, of course - but would we expect someone to make or review a pull request from their BookWyrm account?
- spadufed 3y ago