@raucao but what modern public key cryptography can you even choose without being attacked over lol
These people would be like "we gotta use PKCS11" and then the project will die in the cradle because sucks so hard by being overly complicated with old baggage
@ul but yeah biggest drawback of both of those networks is that 99% of the users like it *because* of the crypto connection so the entire social graph is a circle jerk. They'll need an influx of users who don't give a shit about crypto and want to talk about other things
@creamqueen don't forget to mount some Pirellis or Bridgestone instead lol
Embed this noticefeld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Monday, 23-Sep-2024 11:37:40 JST
feldThe old school hacker crowd is so blind-rage anti-cryptocurrency they're letting pretty great novel things like Nostr and Farcaster fly under their radar. If they tried to mimic these designs you'd end up with worse cryptography (because all the new interesting stuff is mostly related to cryptocurrency) and would probably look like PGP + key servers. They'll make an excuse to put up with the status quo and live with it.
Both Nostr and Farcaster have weaknesses in their design but they do provide a good foundation for decentralized social media that could survive longer term without your content disappearing off the internet permanently. It's just a hard pill for some people to swallow because the design breaks from tradition.
I predict ActivityPub will exist in some form for a long time but there will be a lot of data lost over the years. It's already happening.
@dan I think it will always be impossible as long as content is web native / addressed by HTTPS URLs
If you put it on a completely different ecosystem but allow people to view the content through public websites that proxy to the existing content it would work. This is essentially what Farcaster and Nostr are. But they're making users maintain private keys so their identity is nomadic and that's generally too complex for the average person
Bluesky is trying to architect around this issue by still using web primitives and I predict they will fail.
> And it doesn't even seem like it'd be especially hard to fix, if the software folk wanted to. A tool to export the database as plain text (JSON, whatever) and another tool to import it in the new place.
Yeah it always looks easy to people who haven't touched the code.
First problem is that importing gets you nowhere useful as the entire fediverse only knows about the content under the old URLs.
So ok you import your post history ignoring the other technical issues and you've made a mess: you cannot trust timestamps of activities. Everyone sane orders them in the database using a Flake or Snowflake ID which is a type of time-sorted unique hash. So now you have to be able to backdate these hashes so the import doesn't kill the local timelines by flooding them with old garbage.
Ok so now someone added the ability to backdate Flakes. Next problem is the posts have to be imported and data has to be processed. Any mentions of users needs to be resolved. So every user interacted with has to be imported so the links can resolve to the local copy of their profiles. Is their server dead or account deleted? Uhoh, that's gonna break processing the post. Now you've introduced an edge case nobody can really handle reliably.
How about deliveries? Now you don't know who the posts were delivered to so if you do want to delete any of them in the future you're forced to spam the deletes go every known server like Mastodon does which is terrible behavior.
How about media? Now you have to be able to backup all the media attachments too and restore them onto the new server. Every post with media needs to have the URLs rewritten to whatever the new server's media hosting looks like and (ideally) re-run through their media processing pipelines for security reasons or importing media will bypass your security controls.
Likes, favs, boosts? All lost.
Custom instance emojis? Broken too unless you move those over and the posts need to be re-processed to fix those URLs too
I guess we just don't care enough to fix this trivial problem 🤷
@dan com, net, and org are all ultimately controlled by the US gov via Verisign.
We have already had several fediverse servers lost because someone spammed them with child porn and the server and domain was seized. This hasn't happened in a couple years AFAIK, but it did happen several times and is gonna happen again. Guaranteed.
@dan unless the domain is taken away from you. Or the TLD is retired. Or the registrar shuts down and the domain expires and you can't renew it because it's stuck in limbo.
There are so many possibilities, and expecting people to be able to understand how to purchase domains is still too much. I've said the same thing for years and expected it to get better. It appears no progress has been made there. Too many people are still too ignorant about this.
@Lana staff, but reduced staff. They are deep into the R&D in automating the food production too. It's impressive. You may only need one person in the restaurant soon.
Let's say you have a website at coolsite.com. You may or may not own that domain.
For some reason out of your control, coolsite.com is gone or shutting down forever. You move to newpage.net and start putting your content there. You even import your old content.
But all the links to your old content are broken forever and there's nothing you can do about it.
Do we throw our hands in the air and exclaim that "websites are dead, this will never work"?
No, because it's clear that they still work fine after 30 years of this happening over and over.