The crux of the issue with current software like Mastodon is that people and posts are identified by where they’re hosted, not who they belong to. It’s as if the URL for my blog post was https://5.161.136.163/2023/activitypub-portable-identity/. It moves the post from being controlled by me, the owner of shadowfacts.net, to my hosting provider who controls that IP address. But the web doesn’t work like that, and nor does ActivityPub have to.
>For people who own domains, this is easy: they just point the DNS records at their host and tell their host that their identity should be served from their domain.
@shadowfacts@h FEP-c390 allows users to send activities from any server. For example, you can create account on a new server and send Move() activity to your followers, and they will re-follow you automatically because old actor and new actor are linked to the same DID. Data migration is more complicated. Recipients can update their local copies of posts after receiving Move() activity, but for the outer world links will break.
@silverpill@helge Those are both interesting proposals, but I'm not sure how just attaching DIDs to actors that are still identified by other URIs helps with migration? It'd let you prove that "yes, this new account is controlled by me, the same person who controls my old account" but you still have the issue of people and post identifiers being tied to where they're hosted. The key point of using a domain you control, or a DID, as the primary identifier for objects is that the migration process doesn't change/invalidate any of the data that's already out there
Also sniping recently expired names that exit the grace period are difficult to snipe because they added an exponential price thingy so it will cost you like $180,000 or something hilariously. Gotta wait it out
@strypey IIRC ENS is supposed to be more resistant to squatting because you pay reccurently, not one-off.
But petname systems such as GNS are even more resistant to squatting because there's no scarcity.
That being said, AFAICS it's pretty pointless to decentralise DNS while keeping the base IP layer which works the same way. Maybe Reticulum will help with that.
@feld > Namecoin is a hacked up Bitcoin fork that nobody will run
Lots of people ran it. Most of them were domain squatters, who got in and squatted millions of namespaces way before most of the people wanting to actually use domains turned up. There was a paper written on it, I'll see if I can dig it up.