idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something).
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@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. ️
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trwnh@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@blaine i'm wondering to what extent fedi would implement webfinger if mastodon didn't require it
i think if i had to really pick a format for identity then it would be a weak preference for FQDN, but having your id be a pretty-url is also okay i guess. but one other thing that i think would be cool is being able to find your contacts via webfinger if they choose to make themselves findable by other means! so you could do wf?resource=tel: or ?resource=mailto: and still get back useful info...
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by
@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.
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trwnh@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@blaine yeah, the ultimate goal is letting people link with each other in the spaces that they wanna link up
i think "your website" should be like your home, but also you should be able to go to other websites just as if they were "venues". so you go to the local forum to hang out. but you can still have your activity on that forum broadcasted to your followers. or alternatively you can participate in the forum from your own site, just like you can reply to a github notification email!
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trwnh@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@blaine tumblr made it work so idk if it's "ideal" per se but they definitely had a cultural thing going for quite a while with "dot tumblr dot com" even being a meme at some point
it can't be too hard to manage tbh, the modern version of this is atproto handle services that do nothing but allocate you a subdomain for use on bluesky
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@trwnh the "trick" with webfinger is that it's a way to go from a "name" to an authoritative context (the authority for "x@y.xyz"' 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.
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trwnh@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@blaine there might not be an authority for a phone number but i think it can be handled more like a combo of "local dns resolver" + "registry of phone number". sure in many cases with identifiers that have an authority component you can just use their webfinger if they have one, but i think it would also be cool to be able to use your own webfinger and "proxy out" as needed, in the same way that dns does it
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by
@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.
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by
@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.
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@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
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trwnh@mastodon.socialreplied to blaine@mastodon.social last edited by
@blaine yup, more or less. the only difference i'd make is that instead of having multiple feeds for mastodon/pixelfed/etc i'd rather it was all done via the same identity
one of the things that i wish were implemented broadly is support for `streams` -- arbitrary collections that you could post into and other people could follow. to my knowledge no one other than google+ has done it. and, well... we know how google+ went...
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by
@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.
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blaine@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by
@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 "blaine@bcook.ca", 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.
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by_caballero@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by
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by_caballero@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by by_caballero@mastodon.social
@trwnh 1.) love this, looking forward to the blog post. 2.) i'm not 100% convinced of the analogy of open-world : closed world :: AP : "one" "social" "network" , but it resonates a lot with my thinking on platforms lately. i think the fediverse thinks of itself as ONE OPEN platform, rather than multiple overlapping platforms (that could include closed platforms, too, in every sense of closed including the economic!) with no global guarantees, periodt.
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by_caballero@mastodon.socialreplied to by_caballero@mastodon.social last edited by
@trwnh I use the word platform because everything with an interoperable inbox is a "messaging platform" and everything which has the concept of a thread is a forum platform and everything with listenable content is an "audio platform" and anything with public, readable content is a "publishing platform" but no one assumes you have to be all those things to be an AP implementation...
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by_caballero@mastodon.socialreplied to by_caballero@mastodon.social last edited by
@trwnh ...and yet somehow many people DO implicitly or perhaps even unwittingly expect the "identity layer" for all of this to somehow be easier to harmonize than the content itself, w/E2EE and moderation/blocking guarantees universally applicable, and even expects the many shades of grey between public and private to be "standardizable" [sic] across all form factors and platforms. so yeah, maybe the singular framing of "the fediverse" is the problem, but also a bit of economic fingers-in-ears
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by_caballero@mastodon.socialreplied to by_caballero@mastodon.social last edited by
@trwnh all of which is just to posit that maybe the "social" part allows a certain "closed world" assumption to creep in (and a lot of scope creep!) because identity is infrastructure and people think it's easy to "standardize" social norms globally. anyways, send me the blog post when you push it, or before!
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trwnh@mastodon.socialreplied to by_caballero@mastodon.social last edited by
@by_caballero yeah i'm not saying AP is "open-world" but rather it straddles the line
AS2 requiring the AS2 context is a bit weird from an LD perspective because it introduces weird "supremacy" conflicts especially with the "MUST NOT override" requirement
i've thought that perhaps jsonld context should only ever be a "progressive enhancement" to json, and that new apis or interchange formats should instead use *expanded* form, and processors should expand any compacted json(ld) before using it
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by_caballero@mastodon.socialreplied to trwnh@mastodon.social last edited by by_caballero@mastodon.social
@trwnh oh interesting i didn't realize that you meant openworld/closedwforld that literally in the RDF sense, i thought you meant more in the protocol-design sense (of like "drop all unfamiliar properties" as is conventional for all JSON protocols versus "here is how you cautiously parse or preserve for others what you don't know")