I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@erincandescent @ikuturso @mcc @jrose i think you could replace it with signed updates but in doing so, you've basically just wrapped around to needing a pki

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@trwnh @ikuturso @jrose @mcc there are broadly 3 types of DID that exist at the moment:

1. Fixed unchangable keys (did:key)
2. Depend upon central system for updates (did:web, did:plc); did:web is decentralised in the sense anyone can run a server for said DIDs but a given DID is always tied to a given DNS domain
3. Dependent upon a blockchain for updates (most of them)

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@trwnh @erincandescent @ikuturso @jrose this raises an important question. Why the fuck are we not just using a pki to start with

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@esoteric_programmer @lrhodes @mat @mcc @alter_kaker you are *supposed* to "convert" the user.domain.tld to did:plc:blah, but you can still construct references against user.domain.tld. but you're not supposed to. but every user-facing component only shows you the user.domain.tld instead of the did:plc:blah, so if you're just copying from your address bar, you are going to get the "wrong" identifier most likely.

it has the exact same properties as letting a dns name lapse and get reassigned.

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@mcc @trwnh @ikuturso @jrose did:plc is using a PKI but it also provides ways of doing account recovery that pure-PKI systems fail to acheive

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@mcc @ikuturso @jrose @trwnh basically it kind of comes down to average people are not great at handling cryptographic keys

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@mcc @erincandescent @ikuturso @jrose uhhhh

"key management hard", basically

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@erincandescent i think in order to solve this problem without centralization you do need a ledger ("blockchain"). That's simply the way to get a canonically agreed on ordering of events. I think there are some reasons to go with a data structure *other* than literal blockchain for your ledger. But if you create a canonically agreed on ordering of events (which as far as I'm concerned you need if you want to support key rotation/did changes) then more or less by definition you've made a ledger

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@erincandescent @ikuturso @mcc @jrose isn't plc basically custodial keys?

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@trwnh @mcc @ikuturso @jrose thinking about how my PGP key expires because the certification key was on a yubikey in a bank vault in a different country

[erincandescent@akko.erincandescent.net]

@trwnh @ikuturso @mcc @jrose uhh i thought the custody was being done by the appview or pds but i don’t remember the details

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@erincandescent I have an entirely workable proposal for how to achieve that in a distributed system, which the mastodon dot social post length is too small to contain

[esoteric_programmer@social.stealthy.club]

@trwnh @lrhodes @mat @mcc @alter_kaker This is offtopic in a way, but oho, I didn't have to look too deeply to find this:
https://github.com/qwell/bsky-exploits
nothing extremely serious, but could be used for fishing campaigns and the like pretty easily

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@mcc @erincandescent we should sync up about that at some point, we've thought about it also and it'd be a shame to never turn it into a spec

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@mcc @erincandescent the historical answer to why atproto isn't using traditional PKI, as far as we can tell, is that the authors were under the impression DID is a lot more useful than it is. just a guess on our part.

[tryst@fedi.imu.li]

@mcc@mastodon.social @erincandescent@erincandescent.net are you claiming that 90s pattern of long term identity keys that sign use keys and can invalidate themselves by signing a new identity key is blockchain?

(i mean sure, there's a chain of keys, but no blocks required)

[rakoo@blah.rako.space]

@trwnh

No, the bittorrent DHT has methods to update content sent in the DHT with no need for a PKI: https://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0049.html

@erincandescent @ikuturso @mcc @jrose

[tylercook@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc I do, yeah. So it's just one part of the stack. The complicated parts come later, eh?

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@mat @eniko There is already such a Wordpress plugin that publishes to ActivityPub. I believe publishing a Wordpress or other blog as a PDS would be even easier than ActivityPub. All the ATP single-link APIs are very simple and almost even well documented. So the fact this sort of thing (PDS frontend to legacy data source like Wordpress) does not exist is I think a testament to the fact most people in a position to create such things take a look at, and cannot see the benefit of, ATProto interop

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@mat @eniko Another thing to note. Posts on ATProto are 300 characters. The entire system is set up to mark "schema invalid" and wholly censor any post which is more than 300 characters. So what you'd have to do is put a 270 character summary of your post, plus a link to your real wordpress, into the PDS. (It's not a schema violation to contain *extra* data, so you could include a "full-text" field in the post blob, but no system in existence could read it— not even yours, you'd be publish-only)