Been thinking about this a bit as well, and I’ve mostly come to the conclusion that Mastodon doesn’t have a robust theory of identity OR culture, and is likely doomed to obscurity. I could be wrong, and your suggestion is one part of a solution—get away from server-centrism, to true individual control of their identity and routing.
Webfinger is super-simple, and would be easy for all e-mail hosting providers to give away with their services. Better would be a cryptographic signature for an identity, and follows/permissions can be transparently moved with that key. With DNS used as the temporary resolution to that UID, so you can change e-mail addresses or domains (or have multiple active simultaneously) without changing identity. Full blockchain would be overkill, but decoupling the follow/friend relationships from server name would be a great thing.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. The right answer might be just for everyone to use the server that corresponds to their e-mail address. If Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo provide this, everyone else will just about have to.
All this assumes that the schizophrenic foundation of Mastodon (servers have culture and norm-enforcement, but also federate to servers with FAR different expectations) gets resolved somehow. When the first big server with lots of heavily-federated posters starts allowing spam or ads, it’s going to be an unpleasant discussion on EVERY smaller server whether to block them. I suspect that’ll be the end of this concept, as everyone realizes that it’s pretty much a reinvention of Usenet.
edit: your proposal (followers use the canonical/webfinger address, and cache the routing address for performance reasons) is a worthwhile, simple improvement. Regardless of long-term viability, this would make Mastodon more portable and useful.
Been thinking about this a bit as well, and I’ve mostly come to the conclusion that Mastodon doesn’t have a robust theory of identity OR culture, and is likely doomed to obscurity. I could be wrong, and your suggestion is one part of a solution—get away from server-centrism, to true individual control of their identity and routing.
Webfinger is super-simple, and would be easy for all e-mail hosting providers to give away with their services. Better would be a cryptographic signature for an identity, and follows/permissions can be transparently moved with that key. With DNS used as the temporary resolution to that UID, so you can change e-mail addresses or domains (or have multiple active simultaneously) without changing identity. Full blockchain would be overkill, but decoupling the follow/friend relationships from server name would be a great thing.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. The right answer might be just for everyone to use the server that corresponds to their e-mail address. If Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo provide this, everyone else will just about have to.
All this assumes that the schizophrenic foundation of Mastodon (servers have culture and norm-enforcement, but also federate to servers with FAR different expectations) gets resolved somehow. When the first big server with lots of heavily-federated posters starts allowing spam or ads, it’s going to be an unpleasant discussion on EVERY smaller server whether to block them. I suspect that’ll be the end of this concept, as everyone realizes that it’s pretty much a reinvention of Usenet.
edit: your proposal (followers use the canonical/webfinger address, and cache the routing address for performance reasons) is a worthwhile, simple improvement. Regardless of long-term viability, this would make Mastodon more portable and useful.