Erin 💽✨ (erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net)'s status on Saturday, 07-Mar-2026 00:39:44 JST

@cwebber @promovicz @laurenshof @evan I think one of the problems we’ve had in general is that signing things is a bit of a nightmare. Not just from a non-repudiation perspective (ActivityPub is pretty crap at this - though workable workarounds sort of exist.. - but I doubt ATProto is much better) but from a revocation and propagation of outdated/deleted information perspective.

Why do we not sign things? Because we don’t have a revocation story and also because indirect relaying gives up all sorts of control. Why is ATProto a bit more flexible here? Because they gave up that control to begin with.

If the signatures had expiries (which as far as I remember, they don’t!) you could imagine a world where when you click the boost button on my post, you ask my server for a copy of the post that’s signed and carries a short lived signature and then you would relay the post alongside that signature; but then it turns out that one of your followers is on a server that I blocked and now my post is there and, as a general rule, the Fediverse has decided that this is unacceptable (despite being unenforcible in general!), mostly as a consequence of the fact that we don’t have any form of 3rd-party-enforcible reply controls (I wish we had that, maybe it’ll come as an evolution of Mastodon’s quote controls…)

(And yes, LD Signatures suck, but all signature formats suck in some way or another and signatures are a primitive that it really sucks to build things around. But that’s a whole separate discussion!)