What would it take to add decentralised identity (e.g.

glyn

What would it take to add decentralised identity (e.g. W3C DIDs) to the Fediverse? Who is already working on this?

Bluesky's AT Protocol is a great proof of concept, but probably isn't the endgame. Abstracting Fediverse identity using hostnames and WebFinger is another useful experiment, but again probably not the endgame.

#DecentralizedIdentity #ATProtocol #W3C #ActivityPub

Jupiter Rowland

@glyn Decentralised identity has been available for longer than Mastodon, let alone ActivityPub. Only that it is known as "nomadic identity" here.

It was first implemented by Friendica creator @Mike Macgirvin ?️ in the Zot protocol in 2011 and in a Friendica fork named Red in 2012, later renamed into the Red Matrix, eventually reworked and renamed into Hubzilla in 2015.

Proof: This Hubzilla channel of mine actually simultaneously resides on two servers.

(Almost) everything that Mike has made afterwards, forks and forks of forks of Hubzilla, used to have or still have nomadic identity implemented.

His streams repository contains a fork of a fork... of Hubzilla that intentionally has no name, and that offers nomadic identity via the Nomad protocol with better compatibility with non-nomadic ActivityPub. In July, it had decentralised IDs as per FEP-ef61 (see also here) implemented, a first step by Mike to fully implement nomadic identity in ActivityPub.

Forte, Mike's most recent fork from August, had all support for Nomad and Zot6 removed and only uses ActivityPub anymore while still offering nomadic identity. To my best knowledge, however, it has yet to be declared stable enough to be daily-driven, and it has no public instances.

Other than all this, a non-public development version of @silverpill's Mitra has nomadic identity via ActivityPub in development. I'm not sure whether FEP-ef61 is implemented in the release version yet. It's the only Fediverse project aiming to implement nomadic identity which Mike Macgirvin has nothing directly to do with.

The ultimate goal is to be able to clone a Fediverse identity across project borders. Only considering stable releases, it's currently only possible to clone Hubzilla channels within Hubzilla, using Zot6, or (streams) channels within (streams), using Nomad.

Unfortunately, Mike has officially retired from Fediverse development and only occasionally submits code to the streams repository and Forte anymore.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #DecentralizedIdentity #NomadicIdentity #ActivityPub #FEP_ef61 #Zot #Zot6 #Nomad #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Mitra

silverpill

@jupiter_rowland @mikedev @underlap

>Other than all this, a non-public development version of @silverpill's Mitra has nomadic identity via ActivityPub in development. I'm not sure whether FEP-ef61 is implemented in the release version yet.

At the moment Mitra can interact with nomadic actors on other servers, but can't host them locally.
I'm currently working on a security framework that covers both vanilla AP and nomadic AP, and trying to fix interop between mitra and streams (tracking issue: https://codeberg.org/streams/streams/issues/178).

Mitra will be able to host nomadic actors as streams does, that will probably come in mid-2025.

cc @helge

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Hubzilla (was called 'redmatrix' at the time) brought nomadic identity to the fediverse in 2012. It's still here and nomadic identity still works, though it pre-dates W3C DIDs by a number of years. There also was no AT protocol or Mastodon or ActivityPub back then. Streams, forte, mitra, and probably a few others have working implementations of portable identities using DIDs over ActivityPub today. All of these could still use a bit more work, but they all inter-operate reasonably well at this point.

In the dozen years I've been working on this, the number of people across the entire planet that have been willing to help has been around 3-4. What it would take is for a few people to learn about and explore the vast fediverse that exists outside Mastodon and lift a finger to help out.

Tokyo Outsider (337ppm)

@underlap A lot of work has already been done on this, mostly by @mikedev — you might want to take a look at his Zot protocol (https://codeberg.org/streams/streams/src/commit/11f5174fdd3dfcd8714974f93d8b8fc50378a193/spec/Nomad/Home.md) and his proposal for adding the specifications needed for portable identity on the fediverse (https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md). For an implementation, check out #Hubzilla. Identity portability works really well there... it just runs into some anomalies when interfacing with other services like Mastodon, due to limitations in the current specs here.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

Credit where credit is due. FEP-ef61 was @[email protected].