gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/u/skyjake/16397

> But we need a standard way to sign and verify. As a Lagrange dev you can introduce yours, and maybe others will follow.

I see it as antithetical to Gemini's principles to have a client impose de facto standard technical solutions for something like this. Instead, put forward your own companion spec akin to the feed subscriptions one, and if people find it useful and necessary, it will be taken into use.

IMO, one key aspect of such a proposal would be that it is accessible to both humans and machines, much like the very simple Gemini feed syntax. That way it does not depend on software support.

However, if we look at email and PGP, only a small fraction of people actually take advantage of this kind of technology voluntarily. And this is with s[cp]ammers routinely abusing email identities! Of course, this argues for keeping the solution purely technical to improve uptake, but when it comes to Gemini, I think there is an incredibly high barrier to adding any additional complexity, even if it were just a community convention that is optional for clients to support.

> i think it is the weakest point of gemini today, not fully supported decentralization.

Be that as it may, it's okay for protocols to have weak points. Nothing is perfect for every purpose. Gemini intentionally rules many things as out-of-scope, but this gives it significant advantages, too, not just limitations.

When it comes to decentralization, the gemlogs & aggregators system is perfectly adequate for both feeds and feedback, as evidenced by gemlog activity over the past couple of years.

i am sorry, i understand i need to wrap up this. i wouldn't even write this, just i noticed there was a draft, and i thought it is already posted, and i deleted it.

so in it i was basically saying that to me the old internet way is when the university had a server, and the user was represented by that server.

to me the old internet way is how the email or xmpp designed.

and then the evil greedy corps came to the internet, and they used xmpp but broke the federation. you want to talk to whatsapp user? you cannot from your server, bring them to whatsapp. whatsapp was, and maybe still is based on xmpp. same with many others.

so activity pub for me is nothing about 2.0, it's about old good internet, just implemented for some reason with http.

it had not be http, but well, that's their decision. the decentralized social media in our days was created by webdevs, and web is about http. so obviously they would use http.

there is an alternative, that's xmpp blogging. i am attracted to it, i'll try it.

well, even xmpp has problems. let's say http_upload widely used today for some reason exposes ip of the person who downloads the file to the server of the uploader.

if you hide behind vpn, then the server knows about your activity.

that problem was solved by mastodon to some extent, they cache images.

what i am saying is that decentralization as i understand it makes it less possible/convenient to track user's behaviour and activity.

now i'll say 'bbs', but that's just an example. i have only warm feelings for bbs and its developer. what i am saying are theoretical speculations.

bbs knows lots of things about me. bbs would have known less if i was using it via my server. if my server would fetch the feeds i am subscribed to, if my server wouldn't let the bbs know when i am reading, and which posts interest me.

it is still possible to do, because bbs offers feeds - one way of decentralization.

it would be consistent if i was able to comment as my server's user

@norayr Can’t respond to that whole chain atm, but I can’t think of a time in the old internet that there wasn’t masquerading. Literally as soon as it left the universities you had servers making accounts for unverified users. Who the heck was verified on Geocities or Angelfire? And once anyone could get an email address you had random people on Usenet. IRC was always the Wild West. That was the culture at the time for everyone who wasn’t an academic.

I still quite like my suggestion of a convention for a per-user opt-in way for servers to show client certificate fingerprint <hashes> as identity verification--check my capsule and Skyjake's reply linked above--as an <idea>.

But it's not a fit for Gemini, there isn't a strong need and people simply don't want it. That's pretty conclusive ;)

create account on gemini://gemid.info (<- doesn't exist yet) which generates a verification code

post verification on gemini://bbs/s/gemID or Station or a gemlog with the code

add site/id pairs to gemid.info account, and any other info

It's opt-in, doesn't follow you around, isn't a login-scheme, but addresses some of the security concerns we might have about verifying identities, and also serves, like linktree or finger, as a convenient place to present one's public-facing identity. Some care would be required by the owner so that skyjake@randopage.com didn't takeover the real @skyjake.

I experimented with something like that, id.gemlog.org, but people didn't want a service that stores data. Which is perfectly reasonable.

So now it doesn't store any data, but it does show a text representation of your client certificate hash.

Which is good for nothing as nobody else uses the same hash+rendering :)

@Morgan, am I missing something, or does your idea require that I must trust servers to create and not fake hashes?

@stack that's right, with that idea every "social" or "id" server owner would run the same algorithm to display the same hash, (opt in per user), so as to not leak the underlying certificate fingerprint.

A malicious or hacked server could lie, so it's not e2e identification proof, but "if you trust the server". I think a malicious or hacked server gets you enough other problems that them forging ids is not super important by itself.

openid for gemini — i believe that activity pub is an overkill for the problem it is trying to solve. we have rss/atom/yyyy-mm-dd for fetching news. rss solves the problem of fetching new content, following someone. openid solves the problem of replying/commenting/reacting as someoe. in a sense, we don't need a social network because internet is already one. internet with rss and openid covers essential features of what we call a social network. so let's adapt or design something like...

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