The fediverse really needs key-signed messages.
As long as accounts reside on one server it fails to accomplish its goals, IMO
this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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The Fediverse's main goal was to be a middle ground between completely centralized and completely decentralized networks, though... So I'd say it has accomplished its goal.
Fair enough if you want to move the goal there it's a score.
I had thought the goal was to remove central control over communication.
AFAIK, the team never defined an official goal.
Elaborate?
If posts were signed, it wont matter what instance youre posting from since your identity would be tied to your public key and not the account on a Mastodon/lemmy/etc server.
Thats more decentralized. It helps when you get banned, a server shuts down etc.
It's called self sovereign identity. I'm working on it, it's a big change that may be accelerated by eIDAS.
Yes, we need another PGP vs S/MIME flame war, it's been so long!
But wouldnβt the public key need to be somewhere to? At some point down the line you will probably have to trust some server.
It could be shared across instances too. It's not a hard problem.
Fediverse currently has totally centralised takedowns and bans coz it uses the same account-model as Twitter/Facebook
No, thatβs not how that works.
Users can generate their own keys, and you know itβs the same user as long as they have the same key, even if theyβre on different servers.
No certificate authority is required for this kind of use case.
Ok, but if it's not bound to something like an official domain name how can you be sure the person who signed their posts as president of the EU (or whatever the official title is) to actually be that person is real life?
He's right that the public key would have to be somewhere, maybe on the profile page. The public key would be one more thing to be federated across servers.
So nostr?
It would be a simple enough feature to code on top of the existing Fediverse
Is there any benefit to it over nostr though? You'd have to link your public key to your account(s) and store a backup of your private key in addition to your regular login/password just to get a more fragmented and less seamless version of nostr. A lot of people already have issues figuring out how fediverse works with multiple instances and all... now they'd have multiple accounts with different credentials to keep track of on top of a meta login/password (pub/priv key). With nostr you only have 1 login/password (pub/priv key) to everything, it's just long and you can't change it. At least I think that's how it works, I don't really use twitter/nostr/mastodon type of sites.
Userbase.
This game is more about mindshare. It's not about technical capabilities. Facebook are technically dismal.
Nostr is crypto bullshit.
If they could encourage it at the countries level that would be nice too.
Some German and NL public services have Mastodon accounts IIRC, that's a first step.
This is the way to go. Eu and Europe have to quit US and Chinese closed social media for another solution that can be controlled from Europe.
Yes, agreed. But read the other post and this comment : https://lemmy.ml/comment/10590333 I fear that big tech giant products usage is too strong and only increasing. More and more Google and Microsoft data centers and offices are build in Europe lately. More jobs, less nature, more pollution, less digital sovereignty, more dependency on big tech :(
I thought I saw posts on here from some people suggesting that there were issues with EU law and requirements to be able to delete old messages, which is impossible due to fediverse structure.
Did that get resolved or was that person wrong?
The question hasn't been legally tested, it's no more certain now than it was before.
While it might be the case that the EU could come down on a user's main instance for not deleting everywhere, really it's no different to anywhere else - any app that uses an API or even just a simple scraper can get comments that a user posts, so as with those it could also simply fall to the user to go around each and every instance and request deletion. Arguably, the Fediverse is better than this because it does include a facility for deleting things from a host instance - the only issue is that the other instance might not necessarily follow that (as instances don't necessarily run pure lemmy code, in fact they could run anything).
I thought the EU was in the process of carving out an exception for non-profit organizations
Ban american corporations which still store data on EU citizens on US servers.
I like the idea! But from what I've read USA will be able to access EU citizens data even on EU servers maintained by USA big tech companies.That's how USA law works :(
Furiously googles immigration opportunities
Awesome!