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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Worth pointing out that activitypub, the fediverse etc are the actual 'web3' decentralized systems people seem to be so hyped about, with the added advantage that they run on normal, fast computers and not on the equivalent of a car driving with the breaks pulled so someone can mine coins.

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Well, not quite. They're definitely an improvement to centralized silos, and there's a prominent place for AP in the future of the web. But a big problem with the spec IMO is that it relies on domain names to identify servers.

To really rake things to the next step, we need public key addressing. Ubiquitous adoption of IPv6 would suffice, but public key addressing would be better. Either way, using a domain as a permanent identifier is a fragile and brittle.

Another big problem with AP is that the spec is extensible in ill defined ways while being designed with current social UX in mind, thus counterintuitively making it needlessly restrictive. So there are interoperation problems with different server software that implement the spec differently (look at federating servers like peertube, Lemmy and mastodon, while possible, it is clanky), meanwhile it has to be modified to support ForgeFed (which is what gitea will be using to federate forges).

how is ipv6 addressing not worse than DNSes? Like you move to a different house and suddenly your ipv6 address gets lost?

Perhaps your argument is around DNS spoofing or something but domain names feel pretty non-controversial for most usecases, especially for the fediverse, which is about federation. There's an expectation of multiple multi-user services being the norm!

Domain names are very, very useful. But with regard to activitypub, if a server wants to change its name the federation and social graph is broken entirely. Even if your server goes down and needs to be rebuilt, federation gets broken due to this design decision, because other servers don't know you're offline and new status messages get lost.

It is a brittle point of failure in activitypub.

I guess “domain name change” seems like a much more manageable thing than “IP address change” (I don’t believe IP addresses are portable between hosts?)

I think I understand better what you’re saying though

Well so if servers were able to identify themselves to each other using a public key, they could change domains whenever they wanted and just update the others with a signed message. You'd still use DNS to navigate, for user identifiers, but a change wouldn't break federation. Unfortunately this is not in the spec and it is a bit involved to do.

Well... no, nobody is really hyped about them, but I do think as a technology it is more worthy of the web3 moniker than anything in cryptocurrency land. I like the fediverse, and the user experience is decent, at the same time, there's not really a great reason to branch out and use it if you're living in twitter land, the product is basically at parity with twitter, it needs something to differentiate it (for the masses).

fediverse > mastodon. granted the other platforms not yet well populated but if you look e.g. at bookwyrm, its got nothing to do with twitter https://bookwyrm.social/

Thanks, I'm gonna check this out.

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