Fediverse

Post by Kye » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #80

JadoJodo wrote: post #75

The hacker in me loves the idea of the Fediverse. All of these services seem fun and, different, and I would love to participate. I am even willing to (and have in the past) set them up for myself. The issue comes when I think about my community: I can count on one hand the number of people I know that fit (what I think is) the criteria for the Fediverse: A. Possesses the technical ability to set up their own instanc…

> technical ability to set up their own instance or configure the clients This will be largely alleviated with managed or hosted services. For example, a lot of corporations used to run mail services on-prem but no longer need to do this, they've moved on to purchasing it directly from a provider like Microsoft or Google Workspace. Also, this largely reflects the idea behind Discord and Slack - hosted services will b…

Post by deltarholamda » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #113

deltarholamda wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been pitching this idea for years and no one's ever given a serious critique of the idea. It would dilute the Twitter brand and divide internal resources. That's the main critique I can think of. Would never happen while Twitter was a publicly traded corporation. Under private ownership, it very well might happen. I think the Fediverse idea is great, but people are dumb. @somebody is about as far as most peopl…

It's strange to argue that people are stupid because they don't want to deal with irrelevant technicalities. Are they also stupid because they prefer domain names to IP addresses?

Post by slkdk32 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #45

bduerst wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's just it though - if bad actors gain control, you lose the ability to reject OAuth creds (which is what OpenID is). Things like social engineering or phishing of credentials, which happens at scale today. They need a way to handle situations when bad actors take over, because other solutions handle this with centralized authorities who step in and rectify the issue.

I'm now confused by what you mean when you say "gain control". Are you talking about literally exploiting a bug and hacking the underlying service that is providing access to the pod? In that case, it's a question of who owns and operates the pod. Solid is conceived as a set of standards that can be implemented by either individuals, or by companies on behalf of individuals. Think "data ownership as a service". So yo…

Post by slkdk32 » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #110

armchairhacker wrote: post #104

I joined a fediverse group but it’s all just random short posts. Kind of like knock-off Twitter to put it bluntly. Also the “home” tab is empty which is a bit confusing. I want this to succeed, but as a social media site in order to succeed they need people (interesting people who like to post interesting things), and a good feed algorithm. This is where Facebook, Twitter, HN, etc. are worth a lot: many social media…

For the home tab to populate, you need to follow people. Mastodon doesn't push content you didn't ask for. I would recommend checking out the local and federated timelines and see what people are up to.

Post by easrng » Tue, May 03, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

grishka wrote: post #33

Ambolia wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could still have server-owned accounts with that setup. It just wouldn't be the only option.

You could still have public-key-identified accounts with ActivityPub, too. ActivityPub does, in fact, use public-key cryptography for authentication, and each actor must have a key pair. It's just that it's not its identity — the identifier is a URL where the actor JSON object can be found.