What's the state of the art for maintaining a single account that surfaces in both Bluesky and Mastodon? Just bridgy? (not a slight against bridgy, just the only one I'm aware of right now )
Posts
-
What's the state of the art for maintaining a single account that surfaces in both Bluesky and Mastodon? -
Between FediForum and now the Social Web Foundation I'm very tired of seeing these intensely corporate initiatives in this space where the majority of projects are entirely volunteer (or grant supported) efforts@james @erincandescent one (I think very legit view) on *not* growing the fediverse is that having "the" "fediverse" serve "our" "community" (for any value of "our" and "community") relies in part on it being inaccessible to others. I don't believe in borders, but I do believe in humanity's capacity to build safe, respectful and diverse communities, even in the context of hostile environments. ️
-
Between FediForum and now the Social Web Foundation I'm very tired of seeing these intensely corporate initiatives in this space where the majority of projects are entirely volunteer (or grant supported) efforts@james @erincandescent not angry, but my motivation is thus: I [now] live in the woods near a tiny community (the "big city" an hour away is 10,000 people), and we're dependent on Facebook for community communications. Not just whatsapp, full-on Facebook groups.
The only way I can imagine getting my neighbours off their Zuck addiction is to grow the fediverse to the point that it's a viable space for the individuals and groups alike.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@by_caballero @trwnh omg do not get me started on ens
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh @by_caballero since tel: is extremely fraught, especially nowadays with insane phone spam etc, a Signal/WhatsApp/etc address might be a good alternative example?
I particularly like the "established encrypted messenger" example because the wf->[rel=messenger]-> lookup could get Fedi encrypted DMs "for free."
(obviously lots I'm glossing over that make it more complicated, but in theory it'd be less complicated than many alternatives)
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@by_caballero @trwnh so _in theory_ PSTN operators could provide a lookup system, but it'd be jank af at best, and more likely it would be a horrendous unfixable security disaster.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@by_caballero @trwnh this would work except for the specific way that number portability is implemented. At least historically, and very likely still today, the "database" used to map phone numbers as assigned by exchange blocks (i.e., to a given carrier) to phone numbers that have been ported to a different carrier by the customer (under number portability laws) was a set of spreadsheets synchronized by FTP at intervals. Access to said "databases" is entirely contractual.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh oh, totally. To be clear, the way I imagine it is that to end users, it all looks like a single identity, and which feed/stream is negotiated based on the context you're using the identity. So, e.g., my main public profile might be "[email protected]", and if someone tried to follow me on mastodon, they'd get my "short text notes" stream, and if someone else tried to follow me from pixelfed they'd get my "square format insta-like-social photos" stream.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh for sure; lots of ways to deal with the phone number lookup thing, but "security is hard" in that context
aside: I did a little work a couple of years ago on a thing I was calling "NNS" (the "Name Name System") around how we might use modern cryptographic assertions to step back from the relatively "centralized" mode of DNS (and by proxy, webfinger and atproto's approach), but then IPFS etc imploded and the funding/interest dried up. There are some similar efforts out there, too.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh .. and *critically* for what I think you're saying, there's nothing preventing linking from a webfinger profile to e.g. a wiki or a webpage of any sort, or another identifier like a phone number or a signal account. Again, this is all stuff that informed the original design of webfinger, over 15 years ago now
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh lolsob. This is/was the whole point of webfinger ("It's DNS, for people") but the mastodon implementation kind of missed that part. But it's trivially possible to do that.
My ideal is to have one "personal address" [per life context, e.g., work, family, social, etc] that points to different stuff I'm sharing in different contexts, with tagging to indicate in which contexts it the various feeds/etc might be useful. e.g., a tech-focused mastodon feed, a pixelfed feed for family, etc.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh yup! My long-standing argument is that "jesus of nazareth" *is* the same thing in a social context as an email address / webfinger address, and that "[person] in [context]" is something that's seared into how we do social cognition, whether it's "[name] [family name]" or "[family name] [name]" – i.e., the format per se doesn't matter so much as the recognition that names-for-humans are different from http-style links with e.g. paths and query strings, etc.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh the "trick" with webfinger is that it's a way to go from a "name" to an authoritative context (the authority for "[email protected]"' is "y.xyz" and the authority for "blah.com" is "blah.com"; the challenge with phone numbers is that it's impossible to infer the authority for +1-416-867-5309 / telcos don't provide a lookup system). That's really it; the rest is a cultural thing.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh fun fact, webfinger actually supports URLs and [in theory] phone numbers!
The key (and this is a social science and cultural insight, not technical) is that when you ask someone's "name" or "address" they need something that's unambiguous, personal, and opaque in the sense that it works everywhere (online / distributed, it needs to be globally unique, too) or they won't use it.
Bare domains aren't ideal because (1) they're expensive and (2) management is hard.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh when the first round of "social networks" were built, the first thing that got added to the databases were a "users" and a "friends" table, because "the web" doesn't (didn't?) have that.
Decentralizing that is a radical act, and the sorts of things that we can do with a linked [bi-directional] web of people is infinite and bounded only by our imaginations. AS and AP actions and data formats and C2S are, as I think you're saying, just stubs for rebuilding the old world in a new way. ️
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh linking, which as you point out is key – to people – depends on regular people being able to share their names. I learned a long time ago that most people aren't good at groking the HTTP part of links, because the structure of links is actually really complex. When you mention xmpp and email, the identifier is the thing that makes both of those networks work.
For me, "fedi" or "AP" or the social web or whatever we want to call it has always been about making personal identity linkable.
-
idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).@trwnh nice writeup! Just glancing, so without getting into detail, I think I agree.
This is perhaps my own bias in all of this, but it's interesting that one of the most-consistent aspect of Fedi implementations is their reliance on Webfinger.
I worked on that part because I didn't think the data format stuff really mattered that much, and at worst was going to be stifling. It was excluded from AP for political, http fundamentalist reasons, but [imho] is essential to the networks functioning.
-
I am trying to fix a DNS problem and I am having a bad time so at least I know there really are some constants in the world@kissane there's got to be some deep law about the relative utility of technologies that can be inferred from the contrast between the incredible resilience of DNS and the utter *state* of DNS management tools.
-
Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!@darius nice! The only folks who *I* could imagine insisting on this being opt-in are Oracle's legal team, and they were told in no uncertain terms that this sort of data isn't even *eligible* for opt-out, even in the US of A.
-
Signalling "open in app" behaviour for AP content@evan @julian @nightpool in the Postel sense, though, it's too bad that a client implementor needs to maintain (at least) four discovery pathways, and may require four separate requests to validate the information. Similarly, an ap host doesn't know which spots a client will check, so needs to implement all four. I'm well out of the standards game, but I'd very much advocate for "pick one and stick with it"