Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like the most useful feature a distributed social network needs is the ability to grant/deny access to people based on decentralised identifiers (such as the person's email addresses, although people may prefer to use a dedicated email address for this purpose).

If such a distributed ID system were available, then it should even be possible to move away from one web host to another host, and still have access to your friends' pages, and have them find you. Alternatively you could instruct your current host to broadcast an "I'm about to move" message to your friends before you move your data to the new host.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle standing in the way of this is the spam / privacy issue, since people don't want to have to prove they own a specific email address in order to read your posts on the niche site where you're hosting your profile. Also, if your posts are being pushed out to the sites where your friends have accounts, then you have to implicitly trust the privacy policies and security of all those sites.

The current system the fediverse uses is, more or less, the same as email addresses... with the same downsides. I'm ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud ...My account at the server I'm at, just like email. And yeah, email migration is quite a frustrating process, and the best way to take control of it is to own your own domain name.

Perhaps the solution is, like an MX record, for me to be able to assign my social traffic from my domain name to route to a different server, so I can assign it to the server I'm using, and move it at my leisure? This is why I have my personal domain pointed at FastMail for mail, it means I can move it without giving everyone a new address.

Nice ideas, and I use a similar setup for my personal domain. For people who don't want the hassle of setting up a domain name, maybe there should be a standard by which an email provider could be queried to find someone's social network account provider.

If your email address were, for example, ocd AT trekk DOT ie, an email contact of yours should be able to make a DNS (or SMTP?) request to trekk.ie and find your social network account ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud, where they could send a friend request from their own social network provider. The link between email account and social network account could be checked periodically based on the TTL.

There is a somewhat analogous IETF standard for looking up identity data from mail servers, here:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7929

Webfinger, which the activitypub standard builds on, gives you something like this, but ultimately the provider has to actually support webfinger. This was a neat hack though:

https://github.com/bradfitz/webfist

But it never really went anywhere afaik.

> an email contact of yours should be able to [...] find your social network account ocdtrekkie@mastodon.cloud [...] The link between email account and social network account could be checked periodically

This is how the keybase sigchain works. (And I do mean "works"—as in, it's available now and real people have been using it.)

PS: Your HN profile doesn't contain any contact info.

Sounds like you're describing an SRV recrod

Friendica, Hubzilla and Diaspora support moving their accounts to another server. Diaspora only supports it partly. The protocol part is done, the frontend isn't finished.

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