nreal (xreal now, I guess) airs and friends. Tis the way to go. Doesn’t matter where I look. Tech is still young, but it’s basically what I’ve wanted since I looked in a sky mall magazine all those years ago and saw TV’s in this ugly head band goggle thing. Actually, I think they looked slightly like Apples atrocious headgear.
Just lemm.ee. I dislike having many accounts.
“Try to do something different” This is strong advice, however, I’d change to it “Go do something”
Doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t have to be new, you just need to do.
Have a thought? Go do it instead of convincing yourself not to do it.
Super simple, yet still hard to do when… well… life is what it is.
I’m using nostr but… Yea. I’d rather just stay here. Infact, I even decided to join lemm.ee. Seems nice enough over there.
Hexbear: “A leftist social platform centered around community building through discussion, shitposting memes, and sharing content.”
Read through their rules, they seem reasonable enough. Though, they have no qlams about wielding a ban hammer.
Note: I’m used to leftists being very unreasonable, so maybe I’m giving them too much credit.
I like lemm.ee. They are in favor of users blocking as needed rather than power tripping and defederating.
hexbear.net seems like a nice place from what I’ve seen. Far far left, but in a lulzy way. Haven’t looked into their policies.
They are constantly flipping out on their own.
I joined up with lemm.ee and accidently wander into their shit. It’s a not stop shit-show.
Though, when the hexbear folks drop in, it goes to another level.
Serously though, the hexbear folks I’ve seen so far, being extreme leftists, they sure are lulzies. Droping reason and atacking anyone who shows the slightest weakness.
Good to see there’s some leftards I can respect. Otoh, my sample has been pretty small so far.
Yea, but how do I know you control that anymore either? Back to trusting central authorities, but that’s certainly a way around the problem. Not a perfect way, but I can be reasonablly sure that Linus owns Linus Tech Tips, and if he says from there that his key leaked, it’s probably true. But then again, his site has been hacked before. Heck, even then he has to convince everyone to follow his new key. That’s no small task.
Keeping your shit secure is hard. I’m mostly using Android for this stuff at the moment and I have no trust that anything I do here is secure. Copying it to the clipboard, as these apps do, may be enough to have the key compromised.
And, maybe, I’d like to keep a copy of my key on my person via flash drive. Flash drives get lost sometimes. People get mugged. Even if my key is encrypted on the drive, I have to treat it as if it’s compromised.
Or perhaps I have a print out in my files. Files get stolen sometimes. And for big time content creators, all threats increase as the keys are more valuable than some rando’s.
So we have many software threat vectors and some physical ones. Mehbe my app gets compromised, they push an update, everyone’s keys start getting yanked. It happens. We need disaster recovery options. Until we do, everyone’s reputation on the system is at risk.
My problem lies with the identity theft and recovery.
It’s the public followers I lose.
If Masterofballs says, “Hey, I lost my old key, this is my new one, everyone follow me!” How do I know you are you? How do I know that the identy was even lost? How do I trust you are who you say you are? Especially if someone else has your old key and is impersonating you? Or, mehbe this new account is the impersonator.
It’s a real problem for someone trying to maintain some sort of identity, which, to greater or lessor extents, we all are.
If you just want to be anon, this system works well enough, but if you want to maintain your reputation… there are challanges we need to overcome.
Or, since I really don’t know much about nostr, mehbe they are already working on this problem.
Trustless systems need to be robust.
Like a nostr node, anyone can set one up and they can share information with each other.
If you use Linux, you may notice that the keys are updated from time to time, that’s your system contacting keyservers to get a copy of the public keys to verify package integrety.
But yea, they have a central authority, kinda, but really it’s just a place for people to store their public keys so people can use it to verify cryptographically signed content, or encrypt data meant only for the owner of the key pair that the public key is attached to.
To me, it looks like nostr nodes do this, there’s just nothing implemented yet to recover a hijacked key. Tom (if anyone remembers him) could get a following of 10k people, happen to lose control of his private key, and then we are back to the same problem of a central authority banning someone… Possibly even worse because, well, identity theft without a way to proove it.
At this point, at the very least, I’d like the owner of the private key (regular users) to be able to send a revocation certificate to a node which will flag this particular public key as compromised. Other nodes will see this and the flag will spread. Revocation certificats can only be made by someone with access to the private key. So we shouldn’t have any censorship issues here.
tl;dr of everything I’m going on about here so far
I’d like nostr to implement a way for users to print out revocation certs, just like how we can backup our private keys, so that users have the ability to report compromised accounts to the nodes.
I’d also like there to be a system where we can recover from the above situation without having to start over and rebuild trust under a new identity. Such as having a backup key that can veryify a new key belongs to the person who’s claiming it.
We already have a solution for all this, it’s just a mater of nostr nodes supporting it.
As I recall back when I did gpg encrypted email.
You can create a master key. You use this master key to sign other keys.
Keep that master key super safe.
The subkey is what you use in general practice.
You upload your public keys to keyservers, which I believe is what happens with nostr nodes.
Your master key can revoke the subkeys at any time. This revocation is sent to keyservers and the public key is marked as invalid so other people don’t trust it.
You then make a new subkey signed by your master key to prove it is still you, but with a new key, and upload that public key.
Now that’s the key people use to encrypt data for you, as opposed to the old revoked one.
Now, I’m not sure exactly how it works either with the keyservers or nostr, but it seems like it should be doable. Have an air gaped master key that is only used to sign the keys you use day to day, and it’s that master key’s signature that is the verification of your identity.
Bonus points to this system, I can have five different nostr apps each create their own key. I could later verify all those keys with my master key to prove each of these different keys belong to the same identity. With that verification, if implemented of course, the noster nodes could link all the pub keys signed by the same master key to help people follow an identity across different types of content.
I know I’m somewhat confusing different points I was trying to make, but it should all be possible.
I was thinking like how with gpg you can sign a subkey, use that, if it is comprimised you can send something out saying that the key is compromise and painlessly switch over to a new subkey since the master is only used to confirm subkeys.
Like Keyserver notes that this pubkey is bad, in this case nodes, the keyserver also notes that there is a valid new pubkey and transfers it over.
Went through most (all?) the android clients. They are all either pretty out of date (last commit months ago), very early dev, not released, or otherwise not so great. Amethys is the best so far, which is sad.
MeShell looks intersting, but was never released. The rest are varying bad implementations of twitter. I’ll have to check out the linux clients.
Yep, you’ve convinced me to give it another chance. I really should try out other clients, but android is what I usually use for reading, entertainment, etc… I have plenty of other computers though, I have no excuse.
I wonder if there is a way to change a private key. Say, mine gets compromised, without creating a new account.
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Oh, I’m in no way defending fediverse. It’s neat, technically, but it’s ripe for abuse from inside and out. As for DNS, I wonder if there’s a reasonable way to get around that for ActivityPub.
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Okay, that’s neat. I should look into this indepth. I’m currious how data is copied around without overloading nodes. It seems like it may also have the problem of some people don’t see some comments on a specific post, which leads to confusing conversations, but I haven’t run into that yet as I have on Mastodon. But with Mastondon is was a matter of instances being blocked, this just seems like we may be missing parts of the conversation, kinda like on SSB if there are two groups of people who only have some of the data.
EDIT: My post counts from 1. to 2., but I wrote 1. and then 3… Whatever. The second part is ment to target the end of your reply.
Well, the idea that I can create my own pleroma instance, create an identity, and then go check out noagenda or whoever else’s mastondon’s and the like.
Even peertube iirc. Possibly diaspora?
At that point, blocking me or the instance is the same thing since I’d be the only one on the instance. However, these instances are a bit of pain to setup for the average person, especially if the only point is to create an idenity since that thousands of other people are willing to do it for you.
But yea, that’s why I want to like nostr, mehbe someday a different client will work out for me, but with the way this stuff work out…It’s usually not what Iwant.
As for the deplatforming issues, I’d prefer carring my identity to various places.
In the lemmy case it’s rough because they ban instances and identities are tied to instances.
If they have to kick me out, that’s fine, I’ll take my ID an go elsewhere. Same as if I enter a bar, start some fights, and I get banned.I just go to another bar and, if I have a following, they can go to. Not only can they go, they aren’t banned from visiting the old bar again.
If people followed identites, rather than identities of an instance, we may have a solution. Which is why I like SSB, and, if I understand how it works correctly, why I wanted to like nostr.
The fediverse almost does this. I’d like to fire up my own pleroma identity, for example, and then vist other instances of the various parts of the fediverse and check them out, but I’m pretty sure I have to host all the data I view, which is not ideal.
If I remember that comment right, wasn’t it more about government takedown of central authorities? Nodes, in this case?
If other powers gain control of the node, what happens?
To be fair, I haven’t studied how nodes even work, but I suspect some will get large enough to self-destruct the whole point. Like lemmy.world, where they seem to ban and block at a whim, unless it’s pedo stuff. That shit stays.
I’m not sure how much tipping helps. Do we have an evidence of it working before for a social network of sorts? I suppose there’s twitch subs, superchats, and podcast 2.0 type things that seem to be working, but the traction really isn’t there.
Well, and cam whores, but I don’t think money people spend on sex translates well to other things.
Yea, I just feel frustrated using Nostr, so I won’t be going there for sure.
This was fun while it lasted, but oh well. Mehbe one of these other lemmy instances people have mentioned.
Oh, and I tried to use nostr, I tried to like it, but it’s just a mess. Also, it feels more like I’m being talked at rather than discussions. I like discussions, not link spam.
Federation is overrated. It sounds like a good idea, but it’s terrible in practice. I miss p2p. I guess we call that “distributed” now.
I know BDFL isn’t ideal, but if it’s based on FOSS, we’re good.
Take basic forum software, if shit goes sour, the community can always spin up a new one and migrate. Sure, you don’t get the greater web all mingling in the same place as is the case with federation (kinda) and reddit.
But really, why do we need the rest of the world? We can each have our own corner, sure, the circlejerk effect is real, but it’s also fun. If we want other opinions we can go visit those other people in their space. And, of course, there’s always the giant monolths of X, Facebook, Reddit, what have you.
No real need to have everyone be part of the same instance, federation, or whatever.
Yea, it’s a shame. I’ve had fun here. Nostr is a mess in the exact way my brain despises.
Why not just turn the tables, defederate from everyone, and use this like old school forms? Federation is a flawed idea anyway. Censorship free Lemmy Instance! Much easier when you run the site.
OTOH we also can’t have a BDFL. Really, the ideal way doesn’t exist for us… But in any case, twitter clone is clearly the wrong answer…
We could move on to scuttlebutt, that’s some cool shit.
Yea, I can see this. I could also see a white-list style federation. I think either is fine.
OTOH, I’m not sure having closed circles is all that bad. It’s how we used to do it anyway. Wanna chat about motorcycles? You didn’t go to some site that has everyone talking about everything, no, you went to the motorcycle forum. And if you found that you didn’t work with that group, you found some other motorcycle forum.
Sure, it would be nice to have an online forum where everyone can go and speak freely, but that place needs to be specific to that. Federation is probably not the correct answer for this.
I feel like even for those of us going over there… It’s such a scattered ecosystem…
I’m trying, but it’s a struggle to follow conversations over there.