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1. Cy (cy@fedicy.us.to)'s status on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 07:10:06 JST Cy
   Yeah, there's just no other way to go about it. People can't follow each other, because they could have multiple profiles. If they did, then I wouldn't be able to tell which of their profiles to send posts to. I follow my friend "Susie" for instance, then I post a message; do I send it to susie@instance1, susie@instance2, susie@instance3? It depends on which of those profiles followed me, whether or not I know they're all alt accounts for the same person. If susie@instance1 profile followed me, then it'd be refused if it got sent to susie@instance3.
   
   Troublesome though, because what if this Susie followed me on all her profiles? Then I'd be sending my posts to her three times over. I guess that's fine, it just seems wasteful, and hard to display. And what if Susie reposted a message to all three accounts that I followed? She'd have to change the post author because the Fediverse requires you stay locked in the walled garden of one instance or another (thanks Gargron), so I'd get three identical messages from three Susies, differing only in which profile was the author.
   
   My client could in theory dedup it, if I did somehow know that they were all alt accounts for Susie. Heck if I know how any of us would learn whose accounts are what person though. I really think having alt accounts is important, in case something happens to your instance, but since we don't use public key trust anchors, it's just really messy to deal with more than one account.
   
   #Programming #Fediverse #rant
   
   • silverpill (silverpill@mitra.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 07:10:02 JST silverpill

     in reply to

     • Jupiter Rowland

     @cy @jupiter_rowland

     Proof of concept exists: https://codeberg.org/silverpill/fep-ae97-client

   • Cy (cy@fedicy.us.to)'s status on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 07:10:03 JST Cy

     in reply to

     • silverpill
     • Jupiter Rowland
     Nomadic identity is also broken. Never share your private key. It's the most important, fundamental rule of public key cryptography.
     
     That being said, it'd be neat if we could get our Fediverse clients to keep a secret private key that you never share, and sign posts before sending them to the instance. Google/Mozilla have been fighting to lock people out from doing that for decades, but it is possible I guess.
     
     I did see some proposals on that once, let's see...
     
     https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-integrity/
     
     Good luck writing a client (likely in a browser) capable of doing that, but that would enable nomadic identities. Or maybe you already did, and I'm just woefully uninformed?
     
     CC: @Mike Macgirvin@fediversity.site @silverpill@mitra.social
     
   • Jupiter Rowland (jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu)'s status on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 07:10:05 JST Jupiter Rowland

     in reply to

     • silverpill
     @cy The solution for this problem is being worked on right now: nomadic identity via ActivityPub.
     
     Nomadic identity itself is old. It was first implemented in the Fediverse in 2012 on what's Hubzilla today (I am writing to you from Hubzilla, and my Hubzilla channel is nomadic). However, the only two existing stable implementations of nomadic identity both rely on two different versions of a protocol that is not ActivityPub.
     
     So the new thing is the implementation using only ActivityPub, as being worked on by @silverpill (maintainer of Mitra) and the original inventor of nomadic identity, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ (maintainer of the streams repository and Forte).
   • Cy (cy@fedicy.us.to)'s status on Monday, 18-Nov-2024 07:10:06 JST Cy

     in reply to
     Yeah actually... it's just a needless risk to group identity's together into individual persons. (Plus who's to say you're just one person?) Better strategy would be to keep profiles unrelated, and possibly make a grouping table, for grouping profiles, to crosspost to them, or aggregate their messages together or whatnot.