Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mastodon and Keybase

keybase.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 192 posts

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#131

Post by labster »

zladuric wrote: post #115
zach43 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm personally not at all attached to the 'mastodon.social' domain (i'm self-hosting my own account on a different instance), but I am somewhat surprised at this perspective on TLDs. Most users of the internet have been exposed to TLDs other than ".com". For example, wikipedia is at a .org TLD, US government sites are at .gov domains, university websites are at .edu domains. Most non-US users will frequently interact…

I would like to add a few things on top of the relatively technical reasons why this lack of .com doesn't matter. I'd say most users won't type "mastodon.com" in their "browsers". They will type "mastodon" in their "internet" or, if technically savvy, into Google first. Second, from following the fediverse (not just mastodon, but also pixelfed, peertube etc), i have a feeling that they aren't into mainstream, general…

> Second, from following the fediverse (not just mastodon, but also pixelfed, peertube etc), i have a feeling that they aren't into mainstream, general audience anyway.

Ultimately this is kind of a problem, as we desperately need an general audience alternative to FB/Twitter that isn't about turning outrage into dollars. Right now I'm sure it's nice to hide from the Eternal September, but in the meantime Facebook is enabling ignorance, wasting everyone's lives on purpose, and proposing laws that only they can afford to comply with.

OP is about Keybase, which is trying to solve the problem of why the whole world isn't using GPG. I'm just pointing out that Mastodon has some public adoption issues still, despite the benefit that it can bring to the world.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#132

Post by Nursie »

feanaro wrote: post #130
speedplane wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative. Just b/c something is decentralized doesn't mean you can't take it down or hide it.

Exactly. Even a centralized filtering mechanism can be curated by the community. The important point is that each server gets to decide whether to use it . If a user considers their server is not doing a good enough job with this, they simply move to another server.

That's not a solution for illegal or harassing content.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#133

Post by Nursie »

feanaro wrote: post #129
Nursie wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative. "Nobody can censor us!" is absolutely, unfortunately equivalent to - "Nobody can take down race hatred, online harassment, child abuse images or other evil shit" And we've adequate evidence now to show that humans will use such platforms to post exactly that sort of stuff. For instance one of the bi…

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative. Citation needed, please. This really sounds like your personal opinion presented as a general statement.

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get.

It's not just my opinion.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#134

Post by DanBC »

Nursie wrote: post #133
feanaro wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whilst I appreciate your views, for many/most the idea that no party can affect or take down the content is a negative. Citation needed, please. This really sounds like your personal opinion presented as a general statement.

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get. It's not just my opinion.

I agree. Here's the current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care in England: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528

He's the most tech-focussed minister we have. He's pushing tech pretty hard, so for him to be saying this should be a clear signal to the industry.

See also the consultationn for the online harms white paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/online-harms-whi...

It's really weird that this extremist position ("any removal of content is censorship, and censorship is always bad") is so prominent on HN whenusers of products have shown, every single time, they they don't want it.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#135

Post by ryu2k2 »

dwighttk wrote: post #88
zach43 wrote: post #15

Just wanted to say that i moved from twitter to mastodon sometime late last year amd couldn't be happier with it. Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity. the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more…

I opened a Mastodon account and me and one other person I know who opened an account toot at each other every 6 months or so... I guess there is another person I know who opened one but never toots... I try to pretend it doesn't matter to me, but calling individual posts "toots" really does keep me from talking about the service with other people.

just call them "posts" or "microposts" if you don't like "toot"

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#136

Post by dewey »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #127
willvarfar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People managed to share email addresses, which are name@domain.

And the domain is predictable. There were (and still are) a two-part email form around the web, where the domain part is a drop-down list.

That would not be much different from a drop down of Mastodon instances then?

For both it's a bad way of doing it because people with their own domain can't use it for email and the Mastodon one would be too long to select something.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#137

Post by Fnoord »

DanBC wrote: post #134
Nursie wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the news. Look at the outcry over teen suicides and how facebook/twitter didn't do enough to protect them. Look at the laws around child abuse imagery and how much popular support they get. It's not just my opinion.

I agree. Here's the current Secretary of State for the Department of Health and Social Care in England: https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1089864139835670528 He's the most tech-focussed minister we have. He's pushing tech pretty hard, so for him to be saying this should be a clear signal to the industry. See also the consultationn for the online harms white paper: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/onli…

If there is censorship possible, the government will use and potentially abuse it at some point.

I've seen darknets (or a P2P networks) which were hard to censor (Tor) but also where you could influence via supply and demand (Freenet, IPFS).

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#138

Post by WA »

Twisol wrote: post #41
eadmund wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On my HN profile itself you can find my signatures on Keybase. … or your HN account could just link straight to your Twitter account. I don't get what Keybase adds here.

If you have an account on N different sites, and you want to let people identify you between each of those, linking directly requires (N-1) links per profile, or N*(N-1) links total. When you create a new profile elsewhere, you need to update your profile on each of the N original sites, plus add N links in your profile at the new site. Or you could collect all of your identities into a Keybase profile, which all of…

Or you could collect all of your identities in one other central place (say your website or HN) and link to the central place from all other profiles. Because that is exactly the scenario you just mentioned. Having direct links to all other profiles isn't solved by keybase. The only thing it provides is a central place for profile links – and there are obviously other ways to achieve this.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#139

Post by robryk »

founderling wrote: post #123
mintplant wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who. Actually, no, the whole point of Keybase is that you don't have to trust the central server, and can verify all the proofs yourself. The CLI does this automatically.

1: They claim the integration is needed because people are too dumb to copy&paste a string. 2: The whole user interface is set up so users believe in what they see in the web interfaces. And you want to tell me with a straight face that users will do their own crypto foo instead and validate hashes? Even if the users used that CLI, that does not help. As we saw with Ethereum. They simply pushed out new code that rewr…

> And you want to tell me with a straight face that users will do their own crypto foo instead and validate hashes?

Your Keybase client (for whichever platform) will perform the verification for users you follow. There is no need for any manual action and the verification has to happen when you follow someone (by following someone you're attesting that your client performed the verification).

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#140

Post by Leace »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #113
founderling wrote: post #110

This seems backward. They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities. And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who. It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in…

> It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is. This is because Mastodon is a UX nightmare because of the way they decentralized it. With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage. I get it, decentralization can be great. But so far most of the i…

> With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage.

Nope, that's actually not the problem with Mastodon UX. On Twitter you still have to ask if your friend is @Johnny or @John1256 or @JDoe or depend on visual cues (avatar).

The problem with Mastodon UX (and Fediverse in general) is the friction of "remote follow" buttons instead of one-click Follow (the same goes for reply/like etc.)

Post reply on HN