@helge HTTP currently demands a Host to request certain methods + resources against. the Host is assumed to be a DNS name, so it is easiest to just give everyone DNS names. if you want the Host to be a URI instead of a DNS name, then that involves more work... but the building blocks are already there. it's just that no one has put them together.
Discussion
Loading...
@helge the identity part is typically a URI/IRI. the easiest way right now to "own" your identity is to be given a DNS name that can be used to serve HTTP resources with links to all the other stuff. if you want to move away from DNS+TLS, you will need something like CID+MLS... then re-implement HTTP semantics on top of CID+MLS instead of DNS+TLS. but you could also say that everyone should just be given a fully qualified DNS name for addressability (and use CNAME records for equivalence).
The challenging part is to turn such ideas into something useful. One needs APIs that applications and people can use, not a word salad.
@helge each of those is "something applications and people can use" already. the problem is that they don't use them. maybe "word salad" is a deflection mechanism to dismiss unwanted complexity, but the complexity is necessary. for fedi, the challenge is "make existing fedi softwares recognize that people should have their own domains". once they recognize that, they can create resources within that domain. note "domain" here is more of an entry point. for id, you can call it a "base uri/iri".
@helge HTTP currently demands a Host to request certain methods + resources against. the Host is assumed to be a DNS name, so it is easiest to just give everyone DNS names. if you want the Host to be a URI instead of a DNS name, then that involves more work... but the building blocks are already there. it's just that no one has put them together.
@helge a very simple example: if my identity is https://trwnh.com/#a then you should be able to open TLS on trwnh.com port 443 to GET / using HTTP. then you look at the HTTP Content-Type to figure out what #a means. or you can look at the HTTP headers, for resources without fragments.
but if you go down the stack one layer, then you could say my identity is actually trwnh.com as provided by DNS. the DNS resource record might give you my ipv4 A(ddress) or otherwise point to a C(anonical)NAME.
@helge in fedi right now i am using https://mastodon.social/users/trwnh as my identity, but it could just as well be trwnh.mastodon.social or trwnh.users.mastodon.social or so on, in the same way username.tumblr.com refers to a user of tumblr.com. to "port" this identity in DNS is as easy as creating a CNAME record from trwnh.mastodon.social to trwnh.com or vice-versa.
what is needed for "porting" id on fedi is the express notion of URI equivalence, which fedi softwares currently don't use. but they could.