Fediverse

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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.

founded 2 years ago

universal IDs for threadiverse items (re kbin-core #635) (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by density@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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[–] ono@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A unique ID doesn't have to be long, opaque, and ugly like a UUID. All you need is a + . Add a prefix to distinguish its type from other things at that domain, and you've got an ID that's unique, readable, and easy to troubleshoot.

[–] density@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that would certainly make it nicer! I do not know about the limits of randomness. As long as it would be enough to avoid all the instances that will ever exist accidentally bumping into each other's content.

We already have the IDs you mention in the URLs though, right? In the post I used as the example, the author's home instance URL for the item is https://lebowski.social/post/12337

<locally-unique-number> = 12337
<originating-intance-domain> = lebowski.social

To make things really simple (at least for the end user), instead of having a UUID, you just have a way that can be easily learned to transform the URL by copy/paste by hand, and would also lend itself to programmatic manipulation:

check out [this post](/local/lebowski.social/post/12337)

I still am thinking there must be some reason why this isn't done because it seems very obvious. Either it is more difficult to implement across federation than I am guessing, or there are use cases I am not considering.

[–] ono@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We already have the IDs you mention in the URLs though, right? In the post I used as the example, the author’s home instance URL for the item is https://lebowski.social/post/12337

Yes, the needed information is already present in those URLs, but as URLs, they instruct the browser to leave the current site and visit the origin instance, which is not what we want. To get the desired behavior, we would want:

Those two fields combined in a distinct format (not easily confused with a URL).
An obvious way for readers to get the global ID for any message they see (perhaps with the community/magazine name embedded, to make finding the source forum easy for humans who see it)
Apps (including the web interface) displaying each global ID as a link to the nearest copy of its message (local copy when available, origin instance copy as a fallback)
An easy way to manually navigate to any message by entering its global ID

a way that can be easily learned to transform the URL by copy/paste by hand

Yep. That's the kind of ID we want. :)