eqdw"No globally unique usernames across federated universe" This is a feature not a bug!
Globally unique usernames require a single source of truth. Single source of truth requires centralized authority. You literally cannot have both
gled - MIGRATED@eqdw actually you could, by taking advantage of the federation, for example by using a blockchain inspired datastore to actually store the usernames or to exchange them between instances, IE amending the protocol to support that 'feature'.
But it becomes complicated and almost impractical to code and scale, and there's way more important to do now IMHO.
@gled Using the blockchain still requires individual node operators to respect the blockchain. What mechanism do you have to deal with it when someone decides to just ignore it?
Bitcoin solves this problem by making the financial incentive strong enough that people don't ignore it (fork the chain). Where is the incentive here?
Kevin ✅@eqdw Where is the incentive NOT to respect it, if it's what everyone else is doing? You'd be basically defederating yourself from the rest of the network.
@eqdw Also, the issue isn't really about globally unique usernames so much as globally persistent identities. The latter doesn't even require anything like a blockchain, just a PKI style crypto identity. With that, migrating servers might require you to change your username, but not your actual identity - you could still prove that you're the same person, so your followers could auto-follow you across the migration, despite (possibly) having to change usernames.
🏴☠️🏴☠️KODO🏴☠️🏴☠️@kevin_redacted you could use pki but then your id would have to be a derivative of your private key rather than a pretty domain name
@kodo Yes, but your persistent ID could be hidden under the hood, just to allow followers to automatically follow you across a migration. Doesn't ever have to be user-visible.
@kevin_redacted ok, but "under the hood" of what car? that car has to be a centralized authority
@kodo No, it doesn't. Just have a "i have migrated" verb in the protocol, which requires the user to cryptographically prove their identity with their PKI private key. No central authority required.
@kevin_redacted ah so their identifier would be different but there is a "proof" system that binds third party ids to a single identity kinda like keybase.io? or are you saying we should have global names ala something like namecoin where I become just "kodo" instead of "[email protected]"
@kodo Well, global names would be ok, but would require some kind of blockchain-ish solution. I'm talking about something less drastic than that that wouldn't require any global consensus, but would still enable server migration. Yes, kind of like keybase.io, i think.