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Comment by darknavi | Hacker News Reader

It's extremely rough around the edges but getting into fediverse content (mastodon, kbin, lemmy, etc) has been extremely rewarding to me.

It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)

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For me the main barrier is that I want to have portable/roaming control over my IDENTITY, even if the content hosting is (for now) entirely through a system administered by someone else. If I control the identity, I can at least keep local copies and rehost/repost content later.

Instead, it feels like the current Fediverse demands that I make a blind choice to entrust not merely a copy of my content but also my whole future identity to whatever of these current instances looks the most stable/trustworthy at first glance, hoping my choice will be good for 1-5-10-15 years. It's stressful, and then I look into self-hosting, and then I put the whole thing off for another week...

AFAICT I would need to set up a whole federated node of my own in order to get that level of identity-control. Serious question: Is there any technical limitation preventing the admin of an instance from just seizing an particular account and permanently impersonating the original owner?

In contrast, I was hoping/expecting some kind of identity backed by a private asymmetric key. Even if signing every single message would be impractical, one could at least use it to prove "The person bob@banana.instance has the same private key that was used to initialize bob@apple.instance."

This is basically the entire point of the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), which powers Bluesky. I think it does a ton of stuff right, including portable identity backed by solid cryptography (no blockchain or "crypto"!) and has a lot of promise. It's still in development, but I am hopeful that it will live up to its promise.

can't a malicious bluesky admin steal/MITM users' private keys by messing with whatever frontend javascript users interact with?

In theory, kinda, but you can bring-your-own client, and "the" web client is decoupled from the back-end instance.

"bsky.app" works as a web client for the official "bsky.social" instance, but it also works with the instance I self-host (or any other spec-compliant instance). Likewise, 3rd party clients work with the official instance, and also with 3rd party instances.

However, no key-stealing could possibly happen right now in any case because... the PDS ("instance") holds your signing key - the client never even sees it. Having the server hold your signing keys is very user-friendly, but of course not ideal for security and identity self-sovereignty. In general, the security model involves trusting your PDS (just as you trust your mastodon instance admin, or twitter dot com - the improvements are centered around making it easier to jump ship if you change your mind).

Client-signed posting is something that's not even possible right now, but I believe it's somewhere on the roadmap. If it doesn't happen some time soon I'll be implementing it myself. (I'm writing my own PDS software)

Yes, at the end of the day a malicious client is always a risk with this sort of thing. But the AT Proto does have some mitigation in place—users have a signing key which their PDS needs to act on their behalf (sign posts, etc) and a separate recovery key which users can hold fully self-sovereign and use to transfer their identity in case they detect malicious behavior. It's not foolproof of course, nothing is, but it is thoughtfully designed.

But yes, the protocol does have a fair bit of trust of your PDS built in. But that's inevitable for decent UX—imo the crypto craze proved that basically no one wants to (or can) hold their own keys day-to-day. If you want to have a cryptographic protocol that the average person can use, some amount of trust is necessary. The AT Protocol artfully threads the needle and finds a good compromise that is a (large) improvement over the status quo, in my opinion.

How is this better than everyone having their own Wordpress or Drupal install?

That's never going to work for the average person, sadly. And it misses a lot of social features that a lot of people (myself included) want from social media. Simply put, the UX is way too far off what people want and need.

It will, ISPs just need to start providing the basic hosting infrastructure on their routers again, like they used to. Thankfully we're also at a time where IPv6 is mature enough so that this is greatly simplified !

WordPress is not exactly known for its security.

Sure it is? WordPress updates itself and all plugins automatically. I've had Wordpress sites running for over a decade with zero security concerns ever popping up.

Maybe your point of view is outdated?

Wordpress doesn't have ActivityPub built in, it's a plugin in beta currently. Without AP, there is no client that can pull in website feeds and provide discoverability between WordPress sites, Mastodon posts, etc.

Back in the old days, activitypub was my Rss feed reader. Discoverability was driven by good old fashioned cross linking, comment discussions, and skimmable feeds from aggregators like the one we're on.

People love to reinvent the wheel and claim it's a whole new thing. No ideas on the web have really been innovative since the bubble popped. The innovation has all been on delivery and execution (not wanting to discount any of that).

Firstly, agreed totally about identity.

Secondly, signing every message wouldn’t be impractical at all, I don’t think. We’ve had the technology to do this for a long time and it’s very simple. What we don’t have is good key management. For average users, this would have to be something provided by their devices (phone or the Secure Enclave in your Mac or whatever) - managing keys and the web-of-trust shamozzle are the main reasons why encrypted email for everyone never took off.

Fediverse identity is based wholly on URL. If you want to own an identity, you own a domain.

I've been able to switch mastadon instances without any problems; most instances seem to handle whatever activitypub machinery transfers followers.

So as long as both your source and destination support account transfers, you can usually switch and even seamlessly bring along most of your followers without them noticing.

No idea about your admin question. All bets are likely off with a bad admin. If you want actual cryptographically guaranteed communication, that doesn't exist in a usable form (except for Secure Scuttlebutt, and that's reeeeally stretching the "usable" part)

> I've been able to switch mastadon instances without any problems; most instances seem to handle whatever activitypub machinery transfers followers.

But none of your content goes with, and that's really terrible because it gives a lot of power to petty-kingdom jackass admins.

AT Protocol is heartening because maybe they've got a good solution to that.

You can export your content on the old insurance and import on the new instance

That doesn't actually work, though. Old links don't update or forward to matching instances of your toots on Mastodon. They're isolated. It's a bad experience.

That's a good point. It would be nice to have a streamlined export flow that rewrites your links for you.

(It's technically possible to edit the links in the posts you exported yourself before importing, but technically correct isn't the best kind of "correct")

If your instance suddenly dies without prior notice, you won't be able to transfer your account.

There are people who want to add distributed identity to ActivityPub. It was left out of the spec but there were things left in to make it possible to add later. That's my understanding from a distance, anyway.

This sounds like you want to self host, then federate with instances?

Not OP but I want to point my dns at a host and have them handle it.

You can pay for that service, but you have to administer the instance, and it’s not able to reuse the servers RAM for multiple domains; it’s not like email where spam management is built in.

I'm not too clued in with how federation works - but is this practical?

Doesn't federation require admins of both instances to agree to federate?

If so, I could imagine it not scaling for larger instances that could receive 100+ federation requests a day.

Further, you would have to repeat this step each time to encountered a new instance you wished to participate on.

Is my understanding of the federation process correct or have I totally missed the mark? :D

The federation is opt-out, so by default an instance will accept any federation request. You only block bad instances after the fact (or use some kind of shared blocklist)

I raised issues on mastodon and plemora advancing this view a few years back, to an initially frosty reception that’s since become a grudging “nice to have but hard to add”.

My recommendation was much like MX records for email, so you can use a hosted server under your own identity.

Didn’t the guy who founded the web basically make something like that?

Yes, Tim-Berners Lee led the Solid project[1], which reverses the client/server identity and data model. The user will store their own data and the service provider can only access it under the policy set by the user.

The promise is that one can not only transfer the identity and all personal data across instances of a single service, but also across different services (imagine from mastodon to Lemmy).

Sadly, it never caught on.

[1]: https://solidproject.org/

> For me the main barrier is that I want to have portable/roaming control over my IDENTITY, even if the content hosting is (for now) entirely through a system administered by someone else. If I control the identity, I can at least keep local copies and rehost/repost content later.

This is why I want domains as identities to succeed. I want to own my handle on every platform, but I don’t want to self host.

So where is it kept then?

Sounds they want self custody of their keys. This isn't what the general public want.

Decoupling identity from social is a good idea but you can't just migrate the key storage to a single custodian entity. There'd need to be a multiple custodians to ensure the same power imbalances didn't reappear in a different form (e.g. Google owning everyone's logins).

Exactly. There is no magic trustable non-local/distributed system that replaces 'self-hosted' for this purpose.

All that is needed is a to create your local identity (e.g. like storing fingerprint biometrics on your laptop) and a clever way to sync between physical devices (e.g. through bluetooth).

We're in this weird situation where people don't want to be responsible for managing their own data/id, but can't trust others to do so for them.

Do you know of any existing projects in this space?

I was toying with an idea/protocol where:

1. You add a TXT/CNAME that points to a trusted "authentication provider".

2. When you try and login to a website that supports the protocol, it checks the DNS record and redirects you to your provider.

3. You then "prove" that you own the domain to the provider - how this is done would be specific to each provider, but one possible method could be by providing a signed message that can be verified vs. a public key stored in a DNS record.

4. The provider redirects you back to the original website with a token.

5. Finally the original website consumes this token by sending it in a request to the provider. The response contains the domain as confirmation of the user's identity.

This approach removes the need for self-hosting as users can point and setup their names with third party providers.

Users can also trivially switch to a different/self-hosted provider by changing the CNAME.

Communities could also allow direct registration by hosting their own provider instance and pointing a wildcard subdomain at it: (i.e. *.users.ycombinator.com).

Users could then sign up to said provider using traditional email/password and claim a single subdomain: (i.e. tlonny.users.ycombinator.com)

Thoughts?

GP wants not to self host yet wants to have the control.

Though what you described is just a regular federated identity workflow, except autodiscovery through DNS (though that is already a thing for some)

It’s being worked on:

https://aumetra.xyz/posts/fediverse-nomadic-identities

https://aumetra.xyz/posts/nomad-id-first-steps

Keep an eye on Key Event Receipt Infrastructure (KERI). https://keri.one/

Current spec drafts at <https://github.com/WebOfTrust/keri>.

The main problem with the fediverse is that none of the people I want to read, post there. And they never will, because they are disparate sociopolitical demographics and the fediverse by design keeps them in separate instances that I at some level need to think about.

The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.

I tried it but I just can't get into the flow of things, it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server? I just want to expel my bowels and doom scroll bad funny memes

Maybe if nothing is happening then nothing is happening and you should do something else ;)

Maybe try bluesky

The vaguely detailed, unclear, NIH’d corporate rip-off version that already has privacy concerns (public block list issue) that’s even less developed?

> it doesn't feel like a lot happens during the day, but maybe i'm on the wrong server?

We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. It always looks like there's a lot happening all the time but look deeper and it's a bunch of people offering their weak takes on hot topics to build their brand.

What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter?

My vice was reddit, I could spend a lot of time on different subreddits for different topics and usually always find something new.

But I do agree with you, being away from the noise has been really freeing for my mind

> What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter?

The Russia circus last weekend made for some pretty good near real-time intrigue. That being said, I don’t care what crazy thing is happening…I’m not creating an account to hear what’s being said on “The Global Town Square ™”

My experience of it was actually opposite. I first started from Twitter, trying to piece together something from the chaos of tweets, but then I went to an actual news site which had a nicely packed timeline with latest action and had more accurate and more up-to-date information.

In theory, Twitter should be that real-time news feed from these kind of events, but it doesn't actually work. Signal-to-noise ratio is just very low.

> We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter.

I never cared about algorithmic engagement.

Before (and during) the engagement Twitter:

- has everyone you needed there, centralised

- has search, where you can find people and topics you care about

Mastodon has none of that: you have to know which server to join and how to find people and topics. Centralization always beats distribution in convenience.

You may not care about algorithmic engagement, but that doesn't mean that the content you are looking is free of the incentives created by said algorithmic engagement. I use Twitter search too, but it's full of hot takes, because that's what the network rewards.

It's kinda like the "I don't care about politics" stand. You might not care, but the institutions you interact with every day certainly do.

I mostly use Twitter search to find specific posts like "@rich_harris web components" or similar.

This is extremely useful

How does fediverse intend to pay for server/developer cost? For new technologies many smart people work for free as long as it excites them and when it just comes to maintenance and fixing bugs it wouldn't be cheap for any technology with so many moving parts. Also, early adopters donate with much higher probability than when the masses arrive.

I pay $10 a month to my masto instance. They do a superb job.

Is that the best way? No clue. But I'm glad to chip in.

Coming of age in the late 90s/early 00s we had plenty of forums to choose from, hosted by hobbyists, with nary a monetization scheme in sight. And this was in the era when the tech was far less accessible and the hardware far more expensive. Sure, maybe a modern $5/month VPS running basic forum software isn't going to handle 100,000,000 active users, but it sure will handle 10,000 active users, and that's more than enough to have a healthy community.

(Note: I'm of the opinion that fediverse-style federation in the context of forums is merely a nice-to-have; the web is already naturally federated, and people should not feel bad if they want to save money/tech complexity/administration complexity by settling for ordinary self-hosted forums.)

You are off by 2 orders of magnitude. Plans for 10k active users on managed instance generally seems to be in the range of $250-450[1][2].

[1]: https://toot.io/pricing.html

[2]: https://masto.host/pricing/

This is specifically why I call out the federated model as a nice-to-have, not a requirement. ActivityPub is way, way more demanding of CPU and transfer than a simple forum, and as a result it's extremely difficult to self-host at scale. You can easily service 10,000 daily active users on a VPS serving lean, statically-rendered forum pages.

Mastodon was not designed to be cheap to host

> Mastodon was not designed to be cheap to host

Is there a reason for this, though? Need to be able to iterate on features quickly? Maybe not being able to tackle various complexities with the total available resources? Or maybe federation is just inherently expensive?

Why couldn't we have an alternative written in a more performant language/runtime with maybe things like lower quality images/videos or something?

> Is there a reason for this, though?

Because performance was not a concern when it was designed - or it could be that it was designed for small communities, and therefore not possible to scale-up cheaply. One of the problem is the caching of pictures from the different instances connected (if I remember correctly) which makes the data storage requirements go up very fast

The big issue with hosting forums and the like is trying to keep the bots at bay. I have seen very small forums get over run in next to no time. And putting in bot checks leads to frustration with the users.

Good point, my implicit assumption is that, unlike the classic forums of my youth, forums in the post-LLM age will want to adopt the "tree of invites" model (e.g. how lobste.rs does it) rather than allowing unrestricted write privileges (read privileges can still be public). This creates a localized web of trust that will be mostly manageable at medium scales; ban or revoke invite privileges to any users whose invitees turn out to be bots or sockpuppets.

That's up for each instance to decide. Could be subscription, donation, I can't see why there couldn't be local (non federated) advertising

Fediverse doesn’t feel like a solution

Public service announcement: the only good thing on twitter, massimo, has at least one mirror on mastodon. https://mastodon.social/@rainmaker1973@birdsite.miisu.net

However, BirdsiteLive instances come with their own information for the public.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/fediverse-third-party-mirrors.html

Agree. https://beehaw.org in particular is great

Finding communities is the toughest part.

It's still at the early days, so give it some times. But there are already some lively communities and, IMO, they are generally better in terms of quality since Fediverse is more niche and has higher barrier of entry.

This. Twitter is doing what they can to drive people to mastodon. I've held off closing my Twitter account but I need to get better familiar with mastodon. I was wondering if there are accounts like NWS <location> (weather updates) over there, or so they plan to have some soon. Also from brief exposure, servers like mastodon social reads like left wing echo chambers which is also cringe.

What kind of annoyances have you had on Twitter, as a user, that makes you want to leave?

I have been using Twitter more often lately as I really don't care about what they do to their APIs or whatever, and it's honestly improving lately.

The main reason is I followed a lot of scientists in my field of research who left the platform. Plus there's been subtle (and some not so subtle) changes to the algorithm and the software.

Most of the people I followed before were clearly left wing. After Musk takeover a lot of them left the platform. Plus the algorithm now pushed more right-wing content in the home page. I wouldn't mind if it were real people discussing valid talking points. The problems are 1) they are all coming from blue check mark accounts, 2) most of it are clearly misinformation, and 3) you can tell most of these tweets and replies are troll and bot accounts. It's just annoying.

Musk boosting his own tweets in the feed was annoying. Had to unfollow him.

I use Twitter via mobile website, and it breaks more frequently than before.

Overall, it's become like Musk's other product, Tesla. It over promises and under delivers. It's not reliable anymore. As a 2x Toyota owner I cannot stand products that are results of crappy engineering. So there you go.

Edit: one more thing: it used to be that I could go to the trending hashtags and get latest news in a second. It's not the case anymore. Case in point: yesterday France was trending. I saw the tweets and got the impression that some member of minority community has committed mass stabbing or rape again. Because the Twitter results were brigaded by right wing blue check mark accounts spewing anti immigration propaganda. It was not until I read a BBC article that I realized what happened was complete opposite, police executed an immigrant at a traffic stop.

Twitter has lost almost all of its core values under Musk. It's just sad.

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