One of the things that bug me about ActivityPub is that actor ids must be dereferenceable.
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One of the things that bug me about ActivityPub is that actor ids must be dereferenceable. IOW, you can only fully "own" your identity if you have control over the domain name.
So, here is an insane idea: what if we could use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping to give one valid domain name for every active phone number, which can then be used by the number owner to create ENS-style records?
This would let everyone to set up, e.g, their AP id based on their phone number.
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Raphael Lullisreplied to Raphael Lullis last edited by
Yeah, no one really "owns" their phone number, but in most cases the same could be said about domain names: they are resources that are controlled by highly regulated entities and that need to be able to operate globally.
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@raphael As far as I know, "dereferenceable" doesn't mean that you need a domain name. It is required to dereference 'http' URIs, but other URI schemes may specify a different resolution algorithm that doesn't rely on DNS.
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@silverpill can you think of a practical example? At first I thought of things like torrent files and magnet links, but I am not sure you can change the content of the URI.
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Raphael Lullisreplied to Raphael Lullis last edited by
@silverpill perhaps things like ENS itself?
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@raphael
ipns://URIs can be used as ActivityPub IDs because IPNS content is mutable. I don't know if there is an URI scheme for ENS but yes, that might work too. -
@silverpill but IPNS still relies on DNS, no?
ENS *could* be used, but I don't see how one could practically use it without relying on trusted entities. I used it already to point to email addresses, Twitter and even IPFS files, but how feasible would it really be to update to an IP address whenever my server responding to the corresponding actor ID changes?
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@raphael IPNS shouldn't rely on DNS (maybe they started to use gateways to speed it up? I don't know).
There are ENS deployments on layer 2, in near future they can become very cheap, but you're right, it is difficult to use without relying on trusted parties.My preferred solution is FEP-ef61 where we're piggybacking on DNS but the ultimate authority resides in cryptographic identity.
