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

151–160 of 192 posts

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#151

Post by deadbunny »

giggles_giggles wrote: post #57
pault wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd rather opt in to global passive surveillance than deal with an inconvenient UX?

It's not inconvenient, it's broken. The issue I described above is not the only misbehavior to which I'm frequently subjected. Another example: messages are delayed, often. Recently I failed to reply to an urgent text about a medical diagnosis from my fiance due to Signal failing to push the message to my phone. This is unacceptable behavior from a critical application. Do I get on a soapbox about how surveillance is…

You are aware that SMS is "best effort" as well? SMS is in no way guaranteed to be delivered in anything approaching an urget timeframe.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#152

Post by founderling »

rakoo wrote: post #146
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…

There will never be a truly unique, open identification service, and that's what keybase is trying to do. Not necessarily by saying "this is who I am on keybase and will be my unique identity" but by saying "I am someone, known as X on github and Y on mastodon". The advantage of keybase is that - Any identity on any service can (now) be linked - There is only one protocol to do it and it is all done on the client sid…

    Any identity on any service can (now) be linked
No need to integrate Keybase or any service for this. You just can use any place on the web as a hub and post "I am news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rakoo, I am reddit.com/user/rakoo" there. And from the others you link back to the hub. Say github is your hub then you post "I am github.com/rakoo" on HN and Reddit. This would be user readable and machine readable. And any 3rd party service like Keybase could read it. No need for the social media sites to apply at Keybase and integrate it.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#153

Post by rakoo »

founderling wrote: post #152
rakoo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will never be a truly unique, open identification service, and that's what keybase is trying to do. Not necessarily by saying "this is who I am on keybase and will be my unique identity" but by saying "I am someone, known as X on github and Y on mastodon". The advantage of keybase is that - Any identity on any service can (now) be linked - There is only one protocol to do it and it is all done on the client sid…

Any identity on any service can (now) be linked No need to integrate Keybase or any service for this. You just can use any place on the web as a hub and post "I am news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rakoo, I am reddit.com/user/rakoo" there. And from the others you link back to the hub. Say github is your hub then you post "I am github.com/rakoo" on HN and Reddit. This would be user readable and machine readable. And any 3r…

You _can_ do it but you would be the only one doing it, and as such it would provide little value because no one wants to do this manual dance and if you're such a minority then there will be no automated way to do it.

Keybase provides an (open!) protocol, along with (open source!) tools to do what you describe and then some (a lot of crypto stuff is needed, for instance). You can probably fork the keybase client and have your own hub at notkeybase.founderling.io if you want, so you can implement your very own idea if you so desire, and that would even be an interesting addition to the open web.

Also, you might have missed it but identity providers do not need to "apply" for keybase integration anymore: _any_ service can provide identity and link up with keybase without asking first (https://keybase.io/docs/proof_integration_guide). It doesn't even have to be a web service, so if they want any email provider can do it (although the whole linking thinking would be through http)

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#154

Post by coldacid »

rakoo wrote: post #153
founderling wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any identity on any service can (now) be linked No need to integrate Keybase or any service for this. You just can use any place on the web as a hub and post "I am news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rakoo, I am reddit.com/user/rakoo" there. And from the others you link back to the hub. Say github is your hub then you post "I am github.com/rakoo" on HN and Reddit. This would be user readable and machine readable. And any 3r…

You _can_ do it but you would be the only one doing it, and as such it would provide little value because no one wants to do this manual dance and if you're such a minority then there will be no automated way to do it. Keybase provides an (open!) protocol, along with (open source!) tools to do what you describe and then some (a lot of crypto stuff is needed, for instance). You can probably fork the keybase client and…

Technically you don't need to ask first, but you still need to tell Keybase directly that you support their proof integration protocol in order to be supported from their side of the connection. Not so much a "please let me in" but rather "I'm ready to rock".

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#155

Post by coldacid »

Leace wrote: post #140
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Fedivers…

I find that remote follow is only an issue this way if you've gone directly to the other party's profile rather than following them from your own instance, or when your instance is being banned for some reason by the other party's instance. It could be smoother, but this is what we get for having to defend against XSS.

The bigger problem with Mastodon is the explicit support for censorship via defederating instances you don't like.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#156

Post by rakoo »

coldacid wrote: post #154
rakoo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You _can_ do it but you would be the only one doing it, and as such it would provide little value because no one wants to do this manual dance and if you're such a minority then there will be no automated way to do it. Keybase provides an (open!) protocol, along with (open source!) tools to do what you describe and then some (a lot of crypto stuff is needed, for instance). You can probably fork the keybase client and…

Technically you don't need to ask first, but you still need to tell Keybase directly that you support their proof integration protocol in order to be supported from their side of the connection. Not so much a "please let me in" but rather "I'm ready to rock".

Linking has to go both ways, it makes sense for the hub to vouch for it. Otherwise you have the same situation as the CAs without CTs: ie A can vouch for me, but I can't really vouch for this vouching, so another malicious B can vouch for a fake me.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#157

Post by lifthrasiir »

dewey wrote: post #136
lifthrasiir wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant that the comparison to the email is not adaquate because the number of common email domains had been steadily decreasing (and I hate it).

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#158

Post by bloopernova »

WA wrote: post #138
Twisol wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but if you look at how Keybase is verifying the information and how it is presenting that trust to external users, I feel that the value they are providing has increased greatly over a static page listing social network IDs.

Take a look at https://keybase.io/anthonyclarka2/sigchain

You can see a whole bunch of extra crypto is being used to verify the information.

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#159

Post by rStar »

captainbland wrote: post #150
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…

> Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity. Yeah, this is it for me. Also I don't want to tie my various online profiles together in general. Providing an open, strong, independently verifiable cryptographic link between my online profiles seems like something that a bad actor could exploit to harvest data about me far more easily an…

+++

Re: Mastodon and Keybase

#160

Post by velcrovan »

fermuch wrote: post #26
velcrovan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it. You have always been able to get a keybase proof for ANY website/domain without being approved first. Why do you need to whitelist mastodon instances? Why not just let people type in the domain name for their instance and get rolling?

But now they're showing every integration possible (as in, every mastodon instance they approve of) on their UI

Again…why? who cares? Why is picking from a pre-approved list better than just letting people type in their instance domain name and allowing every instance by default?
Post reply on HN