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   Dave Rahardja (drahardja@sfba.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jan-2024 20:26:15 JST Dave Rahardja

   Once in a while I have #hunches about a software system that keep nagging at me, and over time it usually becomes clearer why something has been bothering me.

   Tonight’s moment of clarity is that there is a fundamental problem with the #Fediverse, and it is that SERVERS CONTINUE TO OWN MY IDENTITY ON THE NETWORK. They may not be *commercial* servers, but they are still *someone else’s computers* over which I have little control.

   Moving between servers is a high-friction activity: I lose all my posts and all my friends. Sure, I can reimport those lists in my new home, but my friends would have to rely on a forwarding note I left in my previous server to find me. I sure hope that old server won’t block my friends or go out of service, because then they’ll never find me.

   • Embed this notice
     Dave Rahardja (drahardja@sfba.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jan-2024 20:26:13 JST Dave Rahardja

     in reply to

     This may seem like trading off one complexity for another—a username/password for, say a cryptographic key or some sort of federated identity—but I think having ownership of one’s identity, and being able to pack up your entire presence in a duffel bag and take it somewhere else will bring us one step to a social network made for the PEOPLE, not the nerds.

     #Fediverse #IdentityPortability

   • Embed this notice
     Dave Rahardja (drahardja@sfba.social)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jan-2024 20:26:14 JST Dave Rahardja

     in reply to

     On the #Fediverse, SERVERS CONTINUE TO CONSTRAIN MY AUTONOMY. Finding the “right” server becomes a high-stakes game for newcomers. I don’t have numbers, but I suspect that users would rather quit the Fediverse entirely rather than relocate their presence to another server when their first one turns out to be bad, because the experience is such a cognitively expensive exercise, and there’s always the looming threat that the next server is going to be just as bad, and they’d have to repeat the process over again.

     I think #ActivityPub conflates the idea of servers as *communication nodes* on the network between which packets are sent, and servers as the means of *identifying users* on the network.

     Users need IDENTITY PORTABILITY on the Fediverse, where their presence can be easily transported between one server and the next, and their state entirely restored wherever they go, without needing previous servers leaving breadcrumbs in order for friends to find them in their new home.

     Tokyo Outsider (337ppm) repeated this.