@noracodes And in the meantime, if it's important to you, the option exists to run something yourself for full control (within the bounds of the law and the provider's terms of service, obviously). Cost would start somewhere around €10/month and quite frankly, it's not *that* much harder to administer an instance than just being a user especially if you go the managed hosting route. I *rarely* have to go into the administration parts of Mastodon on my single-user instance.
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Agreed although this also highlights some of the challenges of the ecosystem today. How many instances are run by coops or non-profits with trustable boards and solid processes, stable finances, and good moderation? How are people not familiar with fedi supposed to find them - and find ones where the culture is a good match for what they’re looking for?
Of course nomadic identity doesn’t solve these problems - they need to be addressed in any case! I’m just saying that your very accurate framing is a good lessons to look at other challenges!
@jdp23 I admit I am not particularly sympathetic to the idea that it is the responsibility of developers or admins to make it impossible to join an instance that is run poorly or even maliciously. Is it the gay bar's fault there's a Nazi bar downtown?
The rest of this, though, I agree with. Building nomadic identity tools, with a clear understanding of the fact that it's not free and not trivial for users even in its best state, is great. So is making it easier to run instances by co-op, and building those organizations.
@noracodes Let me ask a nerdy question: why is content bound to domains and instances in the first place? I’d much prefer if instances were virtual, and less attached to legally sanctioned domain names.
@promovicz The core reason is that you have to establish ownership somehow or else anyone can just impersonate you. There are two ways to do that: connect it to hosting, or make users manage cryptographic material that proves who they are.
I've taken as axiomatic for a looooong time that asking users to manage key material is unacceptable. However, Bluesky does that* and people seem fine with it. This has lead me to revise this thinking, and I'm actually working on specifying and implementing some of the ideas I previously threw away because they require this.
* ATProto requires that users manage keys. Bluesky allows (and indeed almost requires) users to abdicate that key management to them. This is wildly, catastrophically insecure, of course, but people don't seem to mind.
@noracodes Yes, I agree - it’s the “key handling” conundrum. Part of my motivation here is being “more like Discord” - where people can create their own “server” without having to “run tech”. It seems like a nice approach for Fedi, because it would allow users their own style choices (emoji, themes, maybe separate moderation?). Right now, big instances are “kinda bad” for actual communities. This instance (chaos.social) is too big to be a “community” imo.
@noracodes thanks for this!