Gregory's Server
 5 comments
It’s basically impossible to be fully decentralized. Even if we’re sending around IP addresses to each other, they’re still attached to your ISP. Federation and decentralization aren’t the same thing (which I’m sure you know), so I think we can agree that Twitter’s rationale is mad gay.  NEETzsche, they keep pushing the idea that a public key is a valid form of identity. I keep responding to that that in the real world, account recovery and access revocation are hard requirements. People are terrible enough with passwords, and you expect them to both keep their private key secret and not lose it. This kind of thinking is just plain delusional. I wasn’t even considering account recovery in this but you are correct. Since you mention public/private key encryption in the context of decentralization, when I was in university I was under this professor who was really into wireless mesh topologies with that kind of encryption. I should ask him how well they’re coming along. I know the idea has been floating around for decades, but implementation details have precluded its viability. |
Their reasoning behind why ActivityPub doesn't meet their expectations is funny, too. They're basically saying "it relies on DNS and servers, which means it's centralized identity". Yes it is. And no, I've yet to see a fully decentralized form of identity that's actually suitable for the real world. Email is also "centralized identity", and it also relies on DNS, yet somehow it survived for 40 years and is still an essential part of the internet.