Comment on Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks agoThanks for your thoughts on this.
I am not sure how Matrix handles keys but it is a real headache for end users. For me at least
With openid, etc, it’s decentralized compared with centralized and distributed, so you wouldn’t get stuck with one openid provider.
I don’t know much about any of these so thanks for developing for the rest of us.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yeah, I’m thinking of having a separate key per device, and there would be a registry that ties them together. Usernames would not be unique, so to tell two users with the same name apart, the app would check the post signature against the keys in the registry.
This should prevent name squatting, but it would enable pretending to be another user. As long as user names aren’t very important (i.e. it’s closer to Reddit than Twitter/Facebook), this is probably fine and similar to what we have on Lemmy (only unique to your instance).
If we want to guarantee unique usernames, we would probably need to use a consensus system like blockchain. But blockchain has other drawbacks and I’d really rather not go that route.
Which one we go with doesn’t really impact my moderation plans, so I’m going with pub keys for now because they’re dead simple. It’s also nice that it’ll keep working if your country disconnects you from the internet, and someone could smuggle in data from outside if you really wanted to.