I love the #Fediverse but I'm dreaming of something truly decentralized using public keys for identifiers and something similar to the #NASA delay-tolerant network for distribution. No email addresses ever used to identify someone - that's an old system we need to move past.
The beauty of this would be to have key-signing in person so you could show on your feed "I've met this person, they're real, I know them and here's their pubkey to follow -- they aren't AI" and through the six-degrees-of-separation thing we can all follow REAL people and what they engage with. No AI Bots. If there are bots you wanna follow, sure, follow those keys too - but they aren't people and can't show up at key-signing parties and post pictures with us so that's different.
Also, any email service is a public thing that someone might find your leaked password for, etc.
I want my identity backed by a secret key that lives only on my computer -- and part of a wallet of keys that includes ones that I keep offline entirely and only use if the current key does get compromised and yoinked off of said computer.
And IDEALLY I want to have a little USB thingy that has the key and can't be read by my computer - I wanna just be able to send it text and read back the signature for it and never ever have to risk that secret key being stolen thanks to a vibe-coded update to my Linux distro or Python libraries or something sometime in the future.
We have the basic tools to do all that - it's simple off the shelf stuff we could actually do with no real new work needed - just use keypairs (or rather sets of pairs as above, not just a single all-or-nothing loss point) and identify ourselves by them. And then meet and do key-signing and know and tell the network that this person is real.
Anyone? Can we start doing that someday soon before AI slop and AI hacks of email services bring this lovely place we have down? #pubkey #p2p #identity #keysigning #fediverse #email #security #aislop #makestuff
The ideal system would use #IPFS with "home servers" fetching and pinning stuff for users that use them and of course having stuff already fetched quickly for popular accounts, etc.
Maybe those public portals would offer short term pinning for stuff for free but for a fee from users, the content they follow would be kept pinned "forever" (as long as still followed by someone who pays for a support membership on that server) and help pay for the site.
Limits, of course, on total archive sizes, etc. and different types of platforms like microblog interaction, tubes, etc. etc.
Now that we have this infinite influx of fake content possible, created by fake people whipped up by a chat-prompt, can we PLEASE start using keypairs and signing the public keys of actual humans we actually know are real and then actually USING that? Please? Can we do that now, please?
Doesn't have to be based on #IPFS, that's just my personal suggestion - but in general can we work out a federated platform on which users identified by their public keys [and no damn private keys hosted in the cloud anywhere, just don't do that... no... don't... nope, not even that way... don't] and no email addresses and no phone numbers and no mobile device serial numbers or any such things, just public-private key-pairs - more than one and more than one type and with most kept offline unless needed to sign for new ones when rotating later.
Please can we just do that?