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Comment by doytch | Hacker News Reader

Listen I'm not a crazy huge fan of a lot of new tech, but this is pretty transformational. When reading the first article [1] I was struck by the fact that it granted so much new freedom to your "social identity" on the internet. The comparison to hosting providers was incredible, because imagine you building a website and posting your thoughts there or starting a business there...and then immediately being shut down and all your data lost because of some arbitrary change of policy at your "host".

Everyone always talks about how your Google account being tied to logins is scary because you can get arbitrarily locked out. This protocol makes something like functionally impossible since /you/ control your data.

[1] https://overreacted.io/open-social/

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> Bob, however, isn’t technical. He doesn’t even know that there is a “repository” with his “data”. He got a repository behind the scenes when he signed up for his first open social app.

> Bob uses a free hosting service that came by default with his first open social app.

> If she owns alice.com, she can point at://alice.com at any server.

But does Bob own bob.com? That sounds beyond Bob's abilities and interest level. So Bob is stuck on one platform, in practice, and it's full other Bobs who are also stuck. The "free hosting service" (why is it free?) is now the gatekeeper. It may let him switch platforms.

Even if bob "owned" bob.com, that amounts to a row in some centralized database somewhere.

It seems to mean that Bob's free hosting service has to be a relatively benign and permanent institution like ICANN, and not some ropey old operation like Photobucket.

Others on this thread are talking about Decentralized IDs, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier . Looks like those are stored in several competing systems. There's a blockchain one, a Chinese one that wants to know your real name, and a Microsoft one that wants to store your photo. This all has, uh, implications, which sound much less liberating than this at:// protocol does at first.

ICANN is relatively benign but not benign.

Technically sure, but (1) apps that Bob uses have no power over that database, and (2) if someone were to remove that row, Bob could change his handle to something else without losing his identity, data, or reach.

Did they invent the idea of a keypair?

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