Imagine a world without platform lock-in, where no ban or billionaire could take down your social network. That’s what ActivityPub has planned.

Imagine a world without platform lock-in, where no ban or billionaire could take down your social network. That’s what ActivityPub has planned.

  • mountainpilot@kbin.social
    3·
    1 year ago

    I think one limiting factor that has yet to be addressed is that you can move your profile, but you can’t move your content. Another is identity. How do you know which Mastodon server has an authoritative (i.e. “blue-check”) profile for a given person/entity?

    edit: Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it’s possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger problem.

    • KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      Mastodon has the seeds of this authority in that you can put links on your profile and then have them flagged by putting code on the website. So my Mastodon account could have a link to kazuyadarklightofficial.com and the flag proves I own/control that site. So if you know/can determine that site is THE KazuyaDarklight site, then you know you have the right Mastodon account.

    • Socsa
      1·
      1 year ago

      Again, it’s just like email. Anyone can set up an email address with any yourname@whatever. If you really want an identity then you can eg, publish pgp keys. Presumably at some point we’ll have a way of signing posts/accounts.

    • Thorned_Rose@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself. You control the domain and what’s hosted. I could setup @[email protected] and store my content on my server. In much the same vein as custom emails - [email protected] could be my email (technically I could have [email protected] but that could be confusing with only a dropped @ but anyways).

      Obviously this is not going to be a solution for everyone and it would be good to have a way to backup your content and be able to move it between servers. But in the mean time, it’s a workable solution for those who find it important enough to go down that route. 🤷🏻‍♀️

      • tool@r.rosettast0ned.com
        1·
        1 year ago

        I guess for the privacy conscious and content creators, one solution of this would be to host your own instance just for yourself.

        That’s exactly what I did. Have it running in docker containers at a VPS provider for $5/month and ship backups off to Backblaze nightly.

        Never have to worry about my “home” instance dying/suddenly disappearing or defederating other instances. I like to self-host when it makes sense to, and this is definitely a situation where it makes sense.