Okay, sure, let's do this. "nomadic identity" 1. No one has ever even come close to explaining how using a did: uri is supposed to work2. Even assuming it works, no one can explain how it's different than oidc3. Even assuming it was different, what hap...

bumblefudge

@Fripi @ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus ah yes, clearly working in fintech R&D is (checks notes) morally equivalent to conquering europe and exterminating >10% of the population. excellent example of how godwin's law is really a parable about good faith being impossible on the internet.
imagine a conversation where your hatred of blockchains didn't overpower your absolutely bare-minimum capacity to talk to humans as humans.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/ideological-blindness-2013-07-11

pasta la vida

@by_caballero @ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus

I sympathize that sometimes these things can be harsh, but I trust hrefna & ariadne.

I do want DIDs and verifiable credentials to work,

but they don't need blockchain to do that.

one well studied way of doing key management would be the keyoxide & public keyservers way of centralizing.

at this point in time, DIDs have very little of the threat model work done compared to, say, Matrix. so it's hard to compare apples to apples on various loss-of-control events.

most crypto involves either algorithmic theft (DAOs) or wallet theft/loss. hence why the idea of ultimately having to trust an admin to some degree (be they an oauth admin, fediverse admin, or matrix home server) is a better model for right now.

I'd much rather see DIDs/VCs from an angle of torrenting compared to an angle of "let's be the defacto protocol of the internet everyone has to use, break compatibility, and capture all the revenue by licensing it" (web3)

bumblefudge

@risottobias @ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus that's a whole lot of straw men if you're trying to find common ground. you're also assuming i think (or anyone thinks) that DIDs and VCs need blockchain for anything, when about half the serious work on DIDs and VCs has been blockchain free since inception. but you're off to the right start by saying your preferred mental model for DIDs/VCs is "torrentlike", that's worth unpacking.
why's it harsh, exactly? i'm not being harsh?

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus serious question, do you habitually talk to strangers this way? do you block strangers who talk to you this way? you're making a lot of very insulting assumptions about my personal ethics or my relationship to various economic actors that you present as cohering into an "industry". if i'm being totally honest i think it's wishful thinking that all the evils of VC-backed software can be quarantined in "crypto" and "AI".

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus if "designing distributed systems" isn't what i'm doing right now, and being paid for it, then why do you think i haven't blocked you yet? i don't let people talk to me like this unless i'm on the clock, generally speaking.

Jenniferplusplus

@Fripi @by_caballero @ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill

There's a universe where I could close the replies on this thread, but it's not this one. So I'll have to settle for deleting the op and telling everyone to knock it off before I block you.

pasta la vida

@by_caballero @ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus

behavior on discussing crypto usually involves annoying cryptobros who sealion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning)

I would say that while some folks might be open to hearing proposals, the aggressive tone really does no favors to the idea of DIDs. it only further legitimizes ariadne's point about attaching to terms and ruining them. speaking as someone who loves esoteric cryptography protocols (like fuzzytags, ZKP, dining cryptographers, etc) but DESPISES coins, NFTs, DAOs, etc.

none of the work out of the working group seems free of pollution from crypto and web3 thinking. and it doesn't offer a different take that it can defend vs federated thinking. I personally like indieweb stuff.

and none of what it's made even comes close to my approach (it's as different as torrents are to NFTs, or offline is to online)

I'm sure in another decade the working group might come up with something. or actually have a solid threat model. or address failure modes.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus well, as far as i am concerned neither of us are on the clock, so if you feel the need to block me because i am not cryptocurrency-friendly, that is your choice. you are certainly entitled to curate your experiences as you see fit.

but the distributed systems we work on are very different, and mine don’t hurt pensioners or the planet, at least not through volatile financial instruments which require planet-incinerating proof of work consensus to maintain.

bumblefudge

@risottobias @ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus > none of the work out of the working group seems free of pollution from crypto and web3 thinking. and it doesn't offer a different take that it can defend vs federated thinking

i'm sorry but that's not exactly a textbook example of open-minded framing. i am politically on the far-left and i wouldn't even refer to libertarian ideas as "pollution" (well maybe a few specific ones). how is web3 such a cohesive boogeyman for you?

Hrefna (DHC)

@risottobias

To be clear, I don't know that I want DIDs at all. I have yet to see a guide for them that either doesn't start with "down with ICANN" or get heavily tied up in a "down with ICANN" document and I just cannot care

But I do want user-controlled keys. I kind of like a lot of the ideas in VCs but haven't seen a practical form I'm enamored with yet (admittedly not looking hard).

@by_caballero @ariadne @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus

bumblefudge

@hrefna @risottobias @ariadne @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus yeah that's not actually that different from my personal stance, if you can believe that. i've even written some of those "guides" (bitches gotta eat!), but no one wants to read a fair, balanced, realistic guide to what they actually bring to the table in the short term-- that libertarian "sovereign citizen" rhetoric really sells, and scifi about how cool it will be AFTER every user gets cheap commodity tooling for managing keys

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i am here talking to people about FEPs because i have a contract with a public FOSS agency to support activitypub design, particularly around portability mechanismS (plural) and conformance testing. no one who works on crypto cares at all about activitypub, they're funding bluesky, nostr, and farcaster (at rates of investment about 100:1 the non-zuck funding for the fediverse, i might add), those clients would never pay me to be here.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus fwiw i don't take money from proof-of-work clients, i never have and i only started working with ethereum projects AFTER the proof-of-stake transition was greenlit. i would never block someone for being skeptical of cryptocurrency, but i do block people for telling me i am morally inferior to them because (checks notes) "i work in crypto"

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus even proof of stake projects are problematic. cryptocurrency has caused many harms besides the proof of work blockchains, for example the millions of people who have suffered data loss due to ransomware.

i won’t paint you with the sins of the criminals profiting from your work, but will note that your work enables a criminal ecosystem which could not exist with traditional finance.

i have been approached by cryptocurrency businesses, it was fairly straightforward for me to decline their job offers.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus getting warmer but you're still pretty confident that a bounded ecosystem exists that i'm directly contributing to. which software job is completely guilt-free? if i only took government grants (as opposed to supplementing them with higher-paying contracts with VC-backed companies whose direct impacts I'm comfortable with), would that put me on the other side of the good/evil line? if i worked in google's open source division?

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus forgive me if this sounds like sealioning but i think criminals will profit from any work you do in software, period, regardless of whether the source is MIT or Apache-2. there aren't good companies and bad companies, the equity in all these companies gets mixed into a giant evil insurance policy called capitalism and none of us are doing 100% innocent work, period.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus your argument is effectively that there is no ethical employment under capitalism. this is probably true.

but cryptocurrency has directly harmed millions (and, in the case of proof of work projects, the planet too). the team working on, say, google chrome probably hasn’t, although they have certainly pushed the needle in directions favorable to google.

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i think there are long-term consequences to a global market for search engines and browsers dominated by a single incumbent in both, and i think there are long-term consequences to alphabet and meta cornering the market on advertising and bleeding the publication industry 90% in one decade. i don't mind if people disagree about which problem is more urgent, that's just a subjective question of strategy.

Ariadne Conill 🐰:therian:

@by_caballero @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus i agree that it’s problematic, but i think the millions of people who are getting screwed over by ransomware is a more urgent issue

bumblefudge

@ariadne @hrefna @JessTheUnstill @jenniferplusplus my argument is that there is no OBJECTIVELY ethical employment under capitalism. we might actually agree on lots of these topics, just don't tell me i'm objectively wrong in the few corner-cases where we disagree on strategy (or tactics)