An in-depth look at the W3C's new Social Web Working Group, the LOLA specification for ActivityPub, and how standardized account portability protects digital sovereignty and creators from server lock-in.
This is one of the most fundamental problems with the design of the fediverse, nd whilst thus protocol does go some way towards addressing it, it feels like a but if a sticking plaster rather than a true solution. It’s something that I think the nostr protocol got right; your public key is your identity, and you sign posts with your private key. You send your posts to multiple servers, and publish the list of servers you’ve pushed as a message, so when people find it, they can also find the rest if your messages. There’s no needs to migrate your account as all of your content is duplicated on multiple servers, and your public key doesn’t change unless you lose the private key. Server owners can decide who’s allowed to post messages on their server, but the duplication means that no one admin can block you completely.
This is one of the most fundamental problems with the design of the fediverse, nd whilst thus protocol does go some way towards addressing it, it feels like a but if a sticking plaster rather than a true solution. It’s something that I think the nostr protocol got right; your public key is your identity, and you sign posts with your private key. You send your posts to multiple servers, and publish the list of servers you’ve pushed as a message, so when people find it, they can also find the rest if your messages. There’s no needs to migrate your account as all of your content is duplicated on multiple servers, and your public key doesn’t change unless you lose the private key. Server owners can decide who’s allowed to post messages on their server, but the duplication means that no one admin can block you completely.