this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
89 points (90.8% liked)

Technology

59454 readers
4821 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] cypherpunks@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From what I understand even in the federated mode all accounts have to be verified by a central server?

Not all, but currently most are. The long-term account identifiers are DIDs, and they currently support two DID methods: the w3c-standardized did:web method (which makes your identity reliant on your DNS name), and bluesky's centralized did:plc method (which gives you a verifiable cryptographic identity not reliant on you keeping a domain renewed, but which they are responsible for the availability of and could censor).

The log of all operations on the centralized did:plc server is public and auditable, though, so, if i understand correctly, if/when they do censor it that can be detected and people can/will make the various components of the system use uncensored mirrors of it to continue using censored did:plc identities. And other people will choose to use did:web for their identities and be subject to the DNS rules instead (and this choice will be invisible to other users; all implementations are expected to support both methods).

In my opinion, the decoupling of long-term identity from everything else (including your display name, which is also DNS-based but can be changed at any time) is a pretty good idea, and I expect they'll probably support more than these two DID methods in the future.

Thank you for the explanation. I'm curious what this will look like in the UI and UX. did:web doesn't seem like something that the majority can/will use. It makes on easily identifiable by DNS (probably even with whois protection).

We shall see how it pans out.