Saw an article this morning noting that movement of users from #Twitter to alternatives is dropping off now. When it came to a discussion of #Mastodon, it noted specifically the issue of having to research and choose an instance to get started, noting that most people wanting to leave Twitter want to do so quickly with as few additional decisions required as possible. Of course, there are many people here who clearly don't *want* folks from Twitter easily "contaminating" their ecosystem here. And I will continue to speak out against this view.
@lauren and to finalise my three part reply!
Choosing an instance on Mastodon, placed me immediately in a community of interest. I had immediate engagement that was at least somewhat relevant, unlike in twitter where I was just having stuff shoved at me by algorithm.
I think there's actually an advantage in requiring people to choose an instance, or at least, putting a roadblock, albeit an easily bypassable one, that encourages people to choose an instance of interest before joining
/3
@techlife I've heard this so many times. And I still view it as an essentially narrow and selfish view. Period.
@lauren I'm not clear which specific point I made that you are replying to? I'd like to know what's selfish about anything I said, if you are willing to elucidate.
Btw by putting a roadblock, I wasn't suggesting forcing people to have to choose an instance (though I'm curious how it is decided what instance they join if they don't have a choice).
I'm talking about having as part of the sign up, a screen that explains the advantage of choosing a relevant instance, that user can "skip"
@techlife The instance choosing part is the biggest roadblock. I haven't had time to write up a document on this, so I can only refer you for now to my many posts on this topic here, which I wish I had a good way to index ...
There is the annoying conflation of (at least) two things that an instance is: identity provider and community. If we could decouple those at least somewhat, one could imagine a setup where one could be a member of many instances. In that world instance choice is much easier ("identity provider" is not important ~at all, "community" is postponeable).
@lauren @robryk I have argued for this in other posts, to make movement between federated platforms much more portable.
My layman's grasp of activitypub (I'm experienced in IT, networking etc but not specifically about activitypub) there's no baked in decentralised user management. I guess I see something like tor network for authentication.
Not something we'll get quickly even with the will. But it's vital, I believe, and for similar reasons as you Lauren, that it does become a thing.
> I guess I see something like tor network for authentication.
I don't understand how. Tor establishes short-lived circuits. There are (by intent!) no long-term identities anywhere.
You might with to take a look at Secure Scuttlebutt. It implements the "hand the user a private key" approach.
So, whatever you do, the duality from my original comment applies: you either need global consensus (in the meaning of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_(computer_science)), or identifiers can't be freely chosen. (Otherwise you could impersonate a user by "just happening" to choose the identifier they are using. Preventing that is ~equivalent[1] to consensus.)
[1] "~" because I haven't thought enough to prove it
I don't know what bitchain in; based on 30s on Google it seems to be Yet Another blockchain thingy. I will assume so below.
You might wish to take a look at namecoin, which is (was?) an attempt at doing DNS that way.
Note that blockchains don't magically solve consensus. They provide solutions under additional assumptions of a very weird shape (PoW ones' assumption is ~"no one can acquire as much as a third of the computational power we are burning", PoS ones' assumption is ~"no one can acquire a third of the tokens we are keeping track of ownership of").
Note that the "your handle is a public key" setup exists, is well, and is used in some places. If handles are to be choosable and global:
Not everything is possible. Regardless of how many people are working on it, I will strongly doubt that e.g. they can accelerate something to more than speed of light.
I don't want to say that it's surely an unsolvable problem, because it's too poorly defined to assert anything like that. However, I doubt that a formalization of that problem that's close enough to be still subjectively considered the same problem is solvable. I expect that we'll use something that either doesn't have global chooseable handles or that adds some very strong assumption.
@lauren @robryk I'm not actually a fan of using blockchain. I just mentioned it as one possible avenue for decentralised authentication and the convo got side tracked onto that. Happy to keep blockchain out of it. I'm actually looking more towards nee technologies developed specifically for decentralised auth. Not repurposing other technologies.
@robryk @lauren is an intermediate system possible? For example authentication via blockchain (or other decentralised authentication method), where usernames are chosen on the basis of handle+serverinstance (as handles are currently crafted on mastodon). Then each server only has to manage the uniqueness of the ID within their own user base.