I’m pretty certain that mastodon knows that is the wrong thing, it’s just a low-energy project. The author of the underlying protocol, ActivityPub, is brilliant, though, and she’s been working on foundational stuff for a new set of protocols, spritely, oriented around capabilities, distributed transactions and racket. Judging from her promotion of the petname system I’m guessing she’s going to think of just making user IDs content-hashes to an object with a public key and an update rule for account recovery. IIRC a content-addressed distributed storage system was proposed for spritely at some point.
I’m pretty certain that mastodon knows that is the wrong thing, it’s just a low-energy project. The author of the underlying protocol, ActivityPub, is brilliant, though, and she’s been working on foundational stuff for a new set of protocols, spritely, oriented around capabilities, distributed transactions and racket. Judging from her promotion of the petname system I’m guessing she’s going to think of just making user IDs content-hashes to an object with a public key and an update rule for account recovery. IIRC a content-addressed distributed storage system was proposed for spritely at some point.