the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more relaxed and pleasant in comparison.
Maybe i just accidentally joined nicer communities, but i see a lot of small-scale chitchat and genuineness on mastodon than i rarely see on twitter.
I've also had zero issues with the platform from a technical perspective...overall i think Mastodon, etc have done decentralization "right", and have a lot of potential for growth in the future
I try to pretend it doesn't matter to me, but calling individual posts "toots" really does keep me from talking about the service with other people.
Many instances block Mastodon.social and other massive instances, and different instances will have different views of the network (based on who the users of the instance follow and how long toots are retained).
1) Look at this great thing a few geniuses developed
2) The intellectuals and forward looking people early adopt
3) It slowly turns from being cool trendy and useful, into a Walmart-like all things to all people behemoth of gross negligence.
4) Some heavy abuses are uncovered, and using it is no longer valuable to anyone.
Mine is: https://toot.jeena.net/@jeena
As you allude to, discovery is harder since you don't have an algorithm pointing you in the direction of content you're likely to engage with (yes, engage with, and not necessarily enjoy) but once you have found the right people to follow, it's more rewarding because it's your community, not owned by a single corporate entity.
Although I didn't use G+ much in the later days, its closure showed my how irresponsible it is to rely on proprietary platforms. I'm committed to never be active on a proprietary, closed social media platform again.
My main account is here: https://functional.cafe/@loke
I'd love to self-host a Mastodon instance that two-way mirrors my Twitter account and acts as a Twitter client (letting me pseudo-follow folks from Twitter). But in any case, I'd want to ensure that no content from people I follow gets mirrored/hosted on my own instance; the only content actually hosted on my own instance should be the content I post.
I also made a guide for making your own Mastodon CSS:
https://penguindreams.org/blog/using-custom-css-with-mastodo...
https://mastodon.technology/@tracker1
I've thought about putting one up for social.bbs.io or bbs.land
Ummm. I mean, https://keybase.io/mirimir has nothing to do with my "real life identity".
I guess this could be useful to make switching mastodon servers smoother.
Okay, I'm not that dumb, but some users are. And I really don't know how to get started. Not that I've ever been a big social media user, but I'm enough of a hipster to want to say I was on Mastodon before it was ruined.
I'm honestly fine with the mastodon devs not having to spend 1000s of dollars to get the mastodon.com domain. Evidently that domain is so expensive that even the popular heavy metal band "Mastodon" haven't bought that domain (they seem to be at https://www.mastodonrocks.com/ )
BTW, if you're having difficultly finding an instance that caters to your interests, https://joinmastodon.org has a signup flow that shows mastodon instances based on interests. That might help.
Yeah, this is it for me. Also I don't want to tie my various online profiles together in general. Providing an open, strong, independently verifiable cryptographic link between my online profiles seems like something that a bad actor could exploit to harvest data about me far more easily and with a far higher degree of confidence than would be the case without it. It might even be hard to get rid of if integrating websites aren't careful about deleting your keys when you want them to, leading to a bunch of cryptographic litter linking your profiles even when you don't want that.
They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities.
And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who.
It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is.
Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in the mercy of a few organizations again.
Reminds me of all the people who think they hold crypto currency while in reality they "hold" yeah-we-promise-we-owe-you-somethings by some exchange.
Reminds me of how little resistance the Ethereum elite faced when they flushed "code is law" down the toilet and forced all users to switch to a fork with rewritten history.
What makes this attempt of centralization even more tragic is that it does not bring anything to the table. If you want to run a service that let's people claim they are joedoe@host1 and joe_the_doe@host2, just let them publish two messages. "I am joedoe@host1" on joe_the_doe@host2 and "I am joe_the_doe@host2" on joedoe@host1. Neither the integration with the hosts nor the crypto spiel is needed.
- Any identity on any service can (now) be linked
- There is only one protocol to do it and it is all done on the client side
Why would Mastodon (or, really, ActivityPub) be The One service when there are other, working services worth using ?
Any identity on any service can (now) be linked
This is because Mastodon is a UX nightmare because of the way they decentralized it. With Twitter you go on and you @ your friends / etc and you're done. With Mastodon you have to figure out where they are and if they're not all in the same place it becomes a nightmare to try and manage.
I get it, decentralization can be great. But so far most of the implementations of decentralized social networks have been a UX nightmare for even the casual user.
Nope, that's actually not the problem with Mastodon UX. On Twitter you still have to ask if your friend is @Johnny or @John1256 or @JDoe or depend on visual cues (avatar).
The problem with Mastodon UX (and Fediverse in general) is the friction of "remote follow" buttons instead of one-click Follow (the same goes for reply/like etc.)
Actually, no, the whole point of Keybase is that you don't have to trust the central server, and can verify all the proofs yourself. The CLI does this automatically.
2: The whole user interface is set up so users believe in what they see in the web interfaces.
And you want to tell me with a straight face that users will do their own crypto foo instead and validate hashes?
Even if the users used that CLI, that does not help. As we saw with Ethereum. They simply pushed out new code that rewrote history.
For most people it's an entirely secondary concern, not a concern at all or even an anti-feature.
Who do I appeal to, to take down that cyber-bullying material? How do I get my transaction reversed, as the victim of fraud? What do you mean I can't and the system was deliberately designed that way?
Decentralization is not a feature for the end-user, it's a feature to developers. It's probably impossible for a new social network to take on Twitter, Facebook, etc. directly. However, a decentralized social network allows startups to move far quickly and implement other features that the big social networks are lacking.
I suspect that whatever social network eventually pushes out the dominant players today, will use tools like these.
One good precedent for this is AOL. AOL was safer and more user-friendly than the world-wide-web, but the web's decentralized nature allowed competitors to spring up much more quickly. I suspect something similar will eventually happen to today's social networks.
> Are there sites you won't link to?
> Like a Mastodon instance, we reserve the right to work with whichever partners we prefer. We specifically will avoid at least these sites:
> sites which encourage or are known for illegal activity
Just what is "illegal activity"? According to whose laws?
Given that Keybase servers are in the US, I suppose that means US law. And frankly, that sucks.
But please do clarify.
Signal has a lot of experience in UI [1] and security, and Keybase had the identity proofs. I'd love to see them work together rather than compete.
[1] Signal UI used to be horrible but as of the past few months it's improved a ton! It's now my preferred SMS client.
That's funny, I've had the opposite experience. Once I got everyone I know to start using it and was completely locked-in, I started having all kinds of weird issues.
My favorite is when my phone has been off awhile. After I turn it back on, I get a notification for every message I sent/received on another device while it was off. Usually takes about 30 minutes for it to fully sync, buzzing and/or producing popups for every message along the way. I have about a dozen equally frustrating issues I could, if I had the time, enumerate.
And of course because it's free, there's no real support. Signal has been a huge disappointment for me. I'm preparing to move back to regular SMS, but now I have to untangle all of the users like my mother that I convinced to use Signal. Caveat emptor!
But presumably if proving a Keybase user and a Mastodon user are the same is given, when a Mastodon user wants to contact another outside of Mastodon, Keybase Chat may be the new default choice.
I moved to the fediverse to NOT be controlled and regulated by corporations, because there's no need to. Adding such a feature in Mastodon is stupid. What's the next step? Integrated Twitter client?
> To send us the config, you can send us the public URL for your config file or attach it directly in a Keybase chat message to @mlsteele or email miles@keyba.se. In our example the file is hosted at https://keybase.io/.well-known/example-proof-config.json.
Will this always require manual step (sending config by e-mail) or is there some automation planned?
For now, we want to talk to everyone working on integrations, so we can see what steps are working and what are confusing, what could be improved, etc. So we're talking to everyone doing an integration.
There's a middle ground: you can add integration so that it's available from CLI (`keybase prove ...`) but don't show it in GUI ("select integration") so it's not advertising that site.
The proof integration guide looks neat by the way.
Edit: Disregard, chris/malgorithms answered above.
Challenge: Finding me on Twitter. For example, I am not @Nadya
Extra Credit Challenge: Let's say I'm e-famous enough to have imposter accounts but not have a Twitter "verified" badge. Which Twitter account is the real me? And how do you know?
Where Keybase comes in: On my HN profile itself you can find my signatures on Keybase. Keybase is not necessary for these signatures but becomes a convenient place to look. You also do not need to trust Keybase; although in practice many people will. Don't lie to me and tell me you'd verify the keys. :)
Now you can go directly from my HN profile to my Twitter profile and tweet at me knowing that I am who I say I am. Or at least the individual posing as me has access to three of my accounts (HN, Keybase, and Twitter) and that you'd at least be talking to the same person.
The social proof and web of trust bit is where Keybase falls down but that's an inherit flaw of the web of trust (key exchange parties aren't as popular as they used to be and people will sign/trust keys of people they've never met IRL). Ultimately you'll have to trust that the people who follow me on Keybase are certain beyond a reasonable doubt that I am who I say I am. From there, you can trust the social proofs.
I personally use it so that people can find me on other services more easily and know that they are speaking to me.
And the answer is a lot of the New Famous don't have domains to list canonical social media profiles on. They exist solely on silos like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with no way to connect to their fanbase without it.
… or your HN account could just link straight to your Twitter account. I don't get what Keybase adds here.
I see Keybase as a secure address book, on top which secure applications can be built.
*Maybe I shouldn't trust them more than Slack? But I know from experience with pen testers that a password in Slack causes all kinds of problems.
How are people using Keybase right now? I added several of my accounts but I'm especially interested in the GPG encryption/signing.
Would be nice to add "extra" verification via Signal too, or Google Authenticator. Although GPG's public key, if already known, provides a good source for that.
As I understand it, I need to register for Mastodon at some server ``foo``, and with this one single registration I can also access other servers ``bar`` and ``baz`` and read what their members post, but I’m not able to post on those servers myself, only on my original ``foo`` server.
So what happens when ``foo`` goes under for whatever reason? Or what if the admins at ``foo`` decided to ban me from their server for whatever reason? Am I just shit out of luck now?
And what if my friends decide to join Mastodon some time later, but they all agree to join ``bar`` leaving me the odd person out? I think I’ve read somewhere that it’s not possible to relocate my ‘home server’?
The entire ActivityPub concept is flawed, but not because you would be left alone in your server, it's the opposite: since you're interacting with your friends, your friends' server would then fetch all posts from your server and vice-versa, it will be as if there was just one server, but maintenance costs are now duplicated and the discovery process is not great also.
These problems are less problematic the smaller the servers are, which makes me think the best structure would be one in which each user is its own server and just syncs to temporary syncing hubs when possible -- or maybe sync directly to other online peers they know.
Oh, wait, that's what https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ does!
(Disclaimer: I don't use Scuttlebutt nor Mastodon nor anything like that, and I really thought about Scuttlebutt in the middle of my comment, not before.)
How do I integrate with Keybase?
Why would I want my online presence 100% identifiable and traceable back to me?
What is the appeal of this service exactly?