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Simon Brooke

@rauschma also:

"I’ll contrast Mastodon’s architecture with Bluesky’s (another social network with a different protocol that also supports decentralization)."

To what extent does AT protocol actually support decentralisation? The relays are eye-wateringly heavyweight – there's no way they can be financed and run by volunteers, and there's no mechanism through which a commercial third party could monetise them.

1 December at 20:11 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.scot
10 comments
Axel Rauschmayer
Simon Brooke

@rauschma also (I know I'm being picky here – I'm not being hostile, I'm also interested in ways we can improve social media architecture)

"We need search engines for the Fediverse. Those can provide global search and algorithms for global discovery"

Do we? Why?

This seems directly counter to GDPR principles – people shouldn't be forced to be more 'discoverable' than they choose to be. Search engines have a lot of power and are very useful – for harm (e.g. stalking, fraud) as well as good.

1 December at 20:23 | Open on mastodon.scot
Axel Rauschmayer

@simon_brooke Search indeed has to be opt-in (as it already is for server-local search).

I’m fine without algorithms and better discovery and it’s awesome that the Fediverse doesn’t need a firehose (=global view, like Bluesky needs).

But some people find it difficult to find interesting content and accounts. Fediverse search engines can help them.

1 December at 20:38 | Open on fosstodon.org
Simon Brooke

@rauschma some sort of cryptographically signed key ought to be possible. It would probably be very difficult to devise a scheme of reasonably compact keys that would guarantee that two different users could ever generate the same key, but you could make is statistically very unlikely.

1 December at 22:18 | Open on mastodon.scot
Simon Brooke

@rauschma Having said this, however, of course email addresses are also domain name system dependent. And if we had a system of user ids independent from server ids, then we would need some sort of registry which resolved a user id to the address of the place where that user's content could be found, which would be one of

1. Centralised; or
2. Hierarchical, like DNS; or
3. Easily manipulated by bad actors

#1/2

@rauschma Having said this, however, of course email addresses are also domain name system dependent. And if we had a system of user ids independent from server ids, then we would need some sort of registry which resolved a user id to the address of the place where that user's content could be found, which would be one of

1 December at 22:29 | Open on mastodon.scot
Simon Brooke

@rauschma
Continued

Given that choice, tying user ids to server ids, especially given that we now have pretty good user migration tools, looks like a very reasonable choice.

#2/2

1 December at 22:30 | Open on mastodon.scot
Axel Rauschmayer

@simon_brooke One simple approach we could copy from Bluesky:
– Optional: a domain name as a user ID.
– At the domain, a document (either a DNS record or a file at a well-known location) points to the (local) server ID.
– The local profile points back to the domain name.

1 December at 22:41 | Open on fosstodon.org
Simon Brooke

@rauschma That's an awful lot of complexity which gets you back to the same dilemma you had in the first place: either the user owns their own domain name (hosted on the domain name system) *and* a server they can point that domain name at; or they're dependent on someone else to host it.

I don't think you win anything at all.

1 December at 23:23 | Open on mastodon.scot
Axel Rauschmayer

@simon_brooke
– It’s for advanced users only.
– You only need to own the domain *or* the server.
– Upside: If the server suddenly disappears (for technical, legal, financial etc. reasons), then you haven’t lost your identity.

1 December at 23:25 | Open on fosstodon.org
Simon Brooke replied to Axel

@rauschma If the registry with which you have registered your domain disappears, (for technical, legal, financial etc. reasons), then you have absolutely lost your identity.

This is the same problem. Domain registries are these days just commercial entities like any other, and they're frankly often not at the more ethical end of the commercial entity spectrum.

1 December at 23:29 | Open on mastodon.scot
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