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Comment by jimsimmons | Hacker News Reader

Simple and fundamental. I’m behind this.

I don’t fully understand how decentralized these alt-twitters are. But to the extent they can replicate the basic functionality while not requiring mega cap profits it might be a win for us all.

I hope it’s not just a fad.

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I always try to distinguish between decentralization of infrastructure and decentralization of control. I think the former is very difficult to achieve, but that’s ok because the latter is by far the more important of the two.

As long as I can (technically) take my domain based handle and move to another host I’ll be thrilled. I also hope it’s not a fad because I think it’s a huge win for users, especially small businesses.

I wonder how they handle dropped domains that are re-registered.

dropped domains will be a bit of a UX problem.

the human root of identity is the handle (memorable/recognizable), but the real identity root for the account is a DID. which is a pretty open/wild spec, so we mostly use did:plc ("placeholder"), which is a self-authenticating tricky tricky.

withing the protocol and applications, everything under the hood works via DID references, not handle references. a domain handle works by pointing at a DID, but does not control the actual DID ("DID document"). so any old users/followers/href will still be attached to the "old account". and it would be possible for the old account to recovery and set up a new handle.

but the superficial bits (anchor text), and human identity for new lookups, are attached to the handle, and could get pointed to a new DID, or just not resolve. that would be messy.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit more. What happens if the server operator bans a DID? Does that ban the DID across the whole network via federation? What if I run my own server? Does that make me un-bannable?

Is there even such a thing as DID bans or is everything handled via moderation and filtering? I’m guessing impersonation would still be an issue even if domain based handles solve most of the impersonation problem.

So the domain is a mutable pointer to an immutable DID? That’s pretty much how I’d do it too [1]. Very cool!

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32755618

They aren't decentralized, they're federated. If you are on an "instance" of an alt-twitter (e.g. mastodon.social) you are 100% subject to the rules of that instance and your handle isn't portable, though you can generally share content across instances and interact with others.

>you can generally share content across instances and interact with others.

Unless that person is on an instance the owner of your instance doesn't like.

Federation is a form of decentralization though? There's no central critical Mastodon server owned by some entity, anyone can make their own server. It's not like the only way to make something decentralized is to not have servers involved.

Your account is mostly (but not entirely) portable, and redirects works for handles so handle's can be portable as long as you pick and use a webfinger instance under your control or someone willing to redirect. It's nowhere near perfect and especially the ability to move accounts badly needs improvements, so I'm not suggesting it's good enough, but it's slowly heading in the right direction (the ability to move accounts - currently only with the cooperation of the original server - is fairly new)

There is already some basic functionality to alias handles, for example @shane@reustle.org points to my mastodon.social profile. They still need to add a bit better support until it works fully, though. For example, when I tag this alias handle, it gets replaced with the m…social domain. This would let you jump around instances without changing your handle.

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