Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub
Oh, Zot! Nomadic Identity is Coming to ActivityPub
One of the Zot's most powerful concepts for identity management and remote access is being ported to work on ActivityPub. It could change the Fediverse.
Mike Macgirvin, the long-time developer that brought us Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, and the Zot protocol, is bringing his most powerful concept to the rest of the Fediverse: Nomadic Identity.
IMO, this seems exactly what the fediverse needs to thrive. The whole “choose a server” thing is a big disincentive to adoption by most people.
That's not exactly what nomadic identity is about, although it can also help with that.
The way nomadic identity is implemented in Hubzilla for example is that you can have accounts on multiple servers and by importing a shared cryptographic identity into all of them, other servers know to treat them as a single entity. Once that is established you can log into your account on any of the linked servers and use it normally. But if a server goes down or you decide to delete your account on one, you can seamlessly continue to use everything from another linked server.
This article was the first time I understood that particular way of implementing nomadic identity, and it's the first time I've felt genuinely excited by the idea.
My concern is that with "instanceless" nomadic identity on the fediverse is that ultimately, it would mean that instance would lose their sense of differentiation and community, and would simply be infrastructure instead, and that's how we we end up with bluesky.
This implementation though is amazing. It lets people actively lean in to community based instances, without having to only pick one, and it gives people protection against loss of any particular instance.
Super cool, the worry of an instance dying will make people avoid smaller instances and pick the big stable ones. Having this safety net should help balance things out.
I wonder if this could work with threadiverse communities. We've seen communities disappear when an instance goes down. Could the communities also be saved like this?
That makes total sense. Still, it removes the pressure of choosing a server, since migration and use of several servers becomes seamless. As it is right now, there’s the resilience and future lifespan of an instance to consider, plus fragmentation of your identify as defined not by your username but by your actual “online persona” constructed from your posts, etc. (unless you’re really going for alts, of course). You can create other identities on other instances but they are separate, you “lose” your posts, etc. if something happens. if I understood correctly, that becomes less of an issue with nomadic identity?
This is the one feature I always missed from back when I hosted a Hubzilla instance. YES PLEASE!
Yeah. While I could take or leave Hubzilla's UI, this concept in particular was mind-blowing. The fact that it's like, 8 or 9 years old at this point, and the rest of the Fediverse barely supports it, is crazy to me.
Channel relay and data migration seem like huge UX wins if they were to be added to all ActivityPub sites - huge pushback against any arguments to even entertain BlueSky and Threads.
Thank you for this Sean! It is nice read, that nomadic identity is still being worked on.
Does this mean if I block a neoliberal nazi on mastodon it will block them everywhere else too? Awesome.
OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.
The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.
Will this be impacted by browsers killing third-party cookies?
This is scary. So my hashed password gets sent to other instances?
No.
Can you maybe update the article with a link that describes how this solution isn't a security concern? Its knida the elephant in the article
This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a "missing" feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.
If you get a new email address, it doesn't bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don't even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can't, then it's a dealbreaker.
If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic (TM) every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.