This is a rather interesting read: https://bengo.is/blogging/2024-10-03-the-challenge-of-activitypub-data-portability/
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This is a rather interesting read: https://bengo.is/blogging/2024-10-03-the-challenge-of-activitypub-data-portability/
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> There's no reason an ActivityPub server should demand to control the end-user's private keys.
Whilst I agree in principle, in practice, management of security keys is a right pain in the ass for end-users. Sure, you could do authentication via a PAKE (OPAQUE / SRP6a), and then derive a key-encryption-key from the users' password, but that introduces a lot of complexity.
If a user looses their security keys, then they can never continue, there is no password reset option there.
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> I think a lot of people want 'Account Portability' because what they really want is Single Sign On.
This may be true, and hopefully all the work I've been doing around pushing Mastodon towards a more standardised OAuth system that borrows elements from OIDC helps here. For instance, I've just done the pull request for a userinfo endpoint, which would more easily enable this "single sign on” approach.
Add userinfo oauth endpoint by ThisIsMissEm · Pull Request #32548 · mastodon/mastodon
This implements #31257, and gives a response using standard claims from OpenID Connect. Example Response { "sub": "http://localhost:3000/users/thisismissem", "name": "Emelia 👸🏻", "preferred_u...
GitHub (github.com)
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I think something @bengo does kind of miss in this article is how these decisions would impact end users, would it simplify things or add more complexity? “Wait, now you mean I need to choose an authentication server AND a mastodon server???”
For non-technical people, a lot of these proposals would absolutely loose them. Only technical minded folks even know that public/private keys are used in Mastodon.
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@thisismissem
I literally love this and have wanted it so much -
@thisismissem Be that as it may, there will be no E2EE DMs without key pairs. And true data portability also requires them for integrity proofs, no matter how creative you can get.
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@thisismissem
Have you ever chatted with bengo? Love him -
@jonny yeah, was on my list for a while, but finally got to it today because it was nice and small and isolated in scope.
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@raucao yeah, and that's the fundamental problem. To do E2EE, the hard part isn't encrypting the messages, the hard part is key management.
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@jonny we're in a group chat & know each other from other W3C communities
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@thisismissem
Jealous, I wanna come play in standards world. Also I love it when people i like like other people I like -
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>There's no reason an ActivityPub server should demand to control the end-user's private keys.
But it sure can offer to if that's what you want
> I think a lot of people want 'Account Portability' because what they really want is Single Sign On.
Yes please.
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I really like these ideas and ive thought about them a lot in the past year or two ive been on fedi.
I want an SSO provider for an account, then I want to seamlessly subscribe to communities sharing a certain type of content.
I'm not too worried about the user complexity; in theory its not much harder than, say, discord.
I create an account with identity provider A, then subscribe to peertube, pixelfed, mastadon, and Lemmy communities.
Behind the scenes, its all using the same identity keys.
I know activity pub is complex and forgive me if I'm oversimplifying the hard stuff, but I dont see why we can't have this.
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@chihuamaranian @bengo so you can already follow & interact with users of different software, generally, but something like "posting a new link on Lemmy from your Mastodon actor" isn't possible in today's implementations of ActivityPub.
So content consumption is more-or-less fine, but content creation across software from a single identity is not possible today
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@thisismissem hey I didn't miss that. FWIW I actually don't think new users should have an 'identity server' at all (until they want one). but we do agree new users shouldn't have to make the choice as you present it. longer discussion I'll write up later.
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@thisismissem this is what I was getting at with:
> Something that shakes out of unbundling Authentication from Social Servers and even Actor Servers (e.g. using cryptographic authentication and not a actor-server-dependent authentication scheme) is the ability to fully author signed social content without an internet connection -
@bengo aah, okay. The article was pretty technical, and for a lot of users they just want to get setup and start posting.. and then stuff happens later and their like "ugh”
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@thisismissem my goal is to get it so users can get setup and start creating posts without talking to a server (identity or social) *at all* and only replicate to one or more servers when they are ready/able/connected to share those posts with others. i.e. https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/
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@bengo that could be cool.
