Implementing Portable User Identities with DIDs

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5942

Here’s an idea to make Lemmy even better: true account portability.

Right now, your Lemmy account and all your content are tied to one server. Moving instances or having one shut down means losing your digital presence. Frankly, the server controls your online identity.

But what if you controlled your identity?

I’ve opened a discussion on the Lemmy dev GitHub about integrating Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). Think of a DID as a permanent, global ID you own, independent of any server.

Why DIDs are a game-changer for Lemmy:

Real Account Portability: Move your entire account – posts, comments, followers – to any new instance seamlessly. Your identity travels with you.
More User Control: Your online presence becomes resilient, managed by an ID you control, not governed by a single server’s policies.
Proven Tech: It works. Protocols like ATProto (Bluesky) successfully use DIDs for portable user identities.
Full Fediverse Compatibility: We can add DIDs to Lemmy while staying fully interoperable with Mastodon, Kbin, and all other ActivityPub platforms. No breaking changes, just a powerful upgrade.

This is a big step towards a more decentralized and user-controlled fediverse. If you’re interested in more control over your digital self, check out the discussion:

[GitHub Issue: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5942]

If you’re on other ActivityPub platforms, consider pushing for similar solutions! The more platforms that adopt truly portable identity, the stronger the fediverse becomes.

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nomugisan@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
As someone with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) please pick a different name/acronym

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- auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Bad news champ, it’s already in mainstream use.
  
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  - nomugisan@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Fuck the mainstream
    
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- BlessedDog@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Hey, consider yourself lucky. People who go to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy have it so much worse
  
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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  i didn’t name it that’s what its called.
  
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asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
DIDs are cool and all but I would trash your proposal because that is clearly llm bullshit. Put effort into it, seriously.

Oh and also, for big changes like these, you need to make a new RFC: github.com/LemmyNet/rfcs

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I did put effort into it I just got an LLM to write it. I’ll see what the devs say and might make an rfc if needed.
  
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  - asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Well, looks like the lemmy devs (like any reasonable person) will not accept LLM generated shit. So good luck with that.
    
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  - AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yikes.
    
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flamingos@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Real Account Portability: Move your entire account – posts, comments, followers – to any new instance seamlessly. Your identity travels with you.

This is nice in theory but comes with edge cases that are hard to account for. Like, what if you have a post and your new instance defeds the instance the post’s community is on? You either have to allow banned content onto the instance or the user loses data, neither of which are acceptable.

This is part of why ATProto’s decoupling of user data from app logic is kinda genius and the direction we should go in if we want portable actors in Lemmy/thredi.

Full Fediverse Compatibility: We can add DIDs to Lemmy while staying fully interoperable with Mastodon, Kbin, and all other ActivityPub platforms. No breaking changes, just a powerful upgrade.

Not really, every fediverse platform that people use expects an Object’s id to be a https URI it can just fetch the resource from. This is part of why FEP-ef61 specifies a way of translating a DID to a https URI. That’s not to mention that moving existing actors from their current ID to a DID will cause all sorts of interop problems.

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- rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Smells like LLM to me.
  
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  - renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    yeah, if I were a Lemmy dev, I wouldn't take this proposal seriously because of this. I would be wondering if that person really knows what they're proposing and if they're planning to engage in the discussion themselves or let AI do it for them, and in the latter case it would just be a waste of time.
    
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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  we add a did to objects and keep the id the same. supporting platforms will use did old ones will carry on using id.
  
  did is what ATProto uses this is a step in that direction
  
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clot27@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I get llm vibes from this post

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AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
So we’re filing AI slop for Lemmy issues now?

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silverpill@mitra.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The FEP-ef61: Portable Objects describes how to use DIDs with ActivityPub. Here's a slightly less technical introduction: https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/nomadpub.md
It's not easy, though. Adding this feature to an existing project will require a lot of work, especially if you don't want to share signing keys with servers. This was discussed in #3100, Lemmy devs are not opposed to FEP-ef61, but they don't plan to work on it.
Also, I don't recommend copying solutions from ATProto, their did:plc and did:web are not really "decentralized".
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Magnum@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I don’t like LLMs either, but I think its harsh to just close the discussion because someone used an LLM to rephrase someone’s initial idea…

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- AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I mean, sure, but LLM issues are currently plaguing open source projects. Curl, for example: gist.github.com/…/07f7581f6e3d78ef37dfbfc81fd1d1c…
  
  If someone isn’t passionate about something enough to write their own request, why would the devs be passionate about implementing it?
  
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  - Magnum@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Wow that was an amusing read, but not really comparable. Those are automated AI security findings, hallucinated partially. But this is an idea that was phrased out by using AI. He already showed the passion to submit and discuss his idea, what you are doing is valuing the devs passion more than someone that’s clearly not a dev submitting his idea … It sounds a little elitist to me.
    
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Jumuta@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
how would one find someone’s DID public key/ DID documents? wouldn’t it have to be hosted on some single verification server?

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  No thats the whole point of a DID. Its an existing standard that has been established to manage decentralised identity. Their exists multiple ways to handle it so a did is did:source:id where the source can be many different things blue-sky uses a group of trusted identity server, but u can use a selhosted file, the blocckchain all sorts of things
  
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  - SpookyMulder@twun.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The way this comment is written doesn’t sound anything like the OP or the GitHub issue. Different tone, different dialect/spelling… lot of linguistic red flags. Not that I’m judging either way, it’s just suspicious how vastly different they are.
    
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  - Jumuta@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    ah yeah that makes sense
    
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danhab99@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Whelp here I go again

Why not GPG!!??

I’ve been working on my own idea for what the “fediverse” should be, I’m calling it userless because I want to avoid users in the database and I wanna use GPG as the individuals identity because it already exists and can yes perfectly verify for me who created a post, I’m not sure why we need more than that.

I haven’t flushed the whole thing out yet and I plan to hand write proper docs for the protocol.

But GPG has been around since forever. I’ve been told that it’s too hard to use, it’s insecure, it’s too old. And when I use the thing I just don’t agree, there is nothing technically wrong with the product like it should be way more popular.

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  So Activpub needs an actor with an I box and outbox to send a receive content. A did is a virtual actor that reroutes to a real actor a collates across real actors. Ideally can send an activity to a did which is resolved to the current home instance. And the did stores ur profile picture a public key display names bio etc etc. U could use pgp as the key in the did if the devs want to support it as a cryptography protocol.
  
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  - danhab99@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    So Activpub needs an actor with an inbox and outbox to send and receive content. A did is a virtual actor that reroutes to a real actor and collects content across real actors.
    
    Gpg public keys have a dedicated email address field. And if you don’t want to share your “real” email address then just make a new one.
    
    And the did stores ur profile picture a public key display names bio etc etc.
    
    Yeah that’s a pain point I experienced with Gpg armored packets, I couldn’t figure out a way to pack in a PFP. Even shrinking it to 64x64 made the public key file feel too heavy. So I just decided profile pics are out of scope and you should just use gravatar.
    
    U could use pgp as the key in the did if the devs want to support it as a cryptography protocol. The did is also used to sign each message similar to pgp. U simply need more functionality than what pgp provides.
    
    I 80% agree. I do wish PGP armored packets had extra fields and if that’s an RFC that could be sent to the Gnupg maintainers then gpg would be absolutely perfect but I haven’t gotten around to figuring that out. All things considered since GnuPG already exists and it’s already installable everywhere and it already works I figured I could just roll with it for userless atleast. I want to use GPG for all user authentication related concerns.
    
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  - zalgotext@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    A did is a virtual actor that reroutes to a real actor and collects content across real actors
    
    Where is that virtual actor hosted? If it’s centralized, I feel like it defeats the purpose of user-centric identity control. If it’s user-hosted, that sounds like GPG with extra, even more inconvenient steps.
    
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Ludrol@szmer.info ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It will probably need it’s own RFC but let’s hear from the devs if they want to do it. (In my experience it’s hard to push through the desired change)

You will have better time trying to implement this in piefed

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- rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  IMO nomadic identity is more important in Mastodon, etc where the fundamental connections of the network are person-to-person - the emphasis is on following other people and having them follow you and that is what determines what content you see. Also being free to leave (and go somewhere else) is a killer feature that centralized social networks cannot offer and nomadic identity really leans into that strength.
  
  In contrast, in the threadiverse you can't follow other people - you join communities. Also when a post is viewed the author is just another piece of meta data, the focus is really on the content. With Mastodon they make a much bigger deal about who is saying the thing, display their avatar much bigger, etc. On Mastodon they're YOUR posts that are strongly tied to you. But here, the posts you make are kiinda more like contributions to a shared wiki (community).
  
  So in PieFed/Lemmy if you need to drop your account on an instance and create a new account on another it's really much less of a loss and not really disruptive at all. You can just import your settings from the old account and continue to post in all the same communities you did before. The need for a nomadic identity just isn't as strong.
  
  Moving communities to another instance, tho, now that would be great. It's on my very long list.
  
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  - muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Due to how the fediverse works if users can be given a did so can a community. It would only migrate for services that support did but wouldn’t be all to different.
    
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INeedMana@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

DID as a permanent, global ID you own, independent of any server

So there would have to be another server, hosting my identity? Would identities somehow be federated between identity instances?

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Did can be served by your own server as just a json blob or federated between multiple identity servers or on the blockchain. A did is did:source:publickey and their are multiple different sources u can use.
  
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  - INeedMana@piefed.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    a json blob
    
    So in a way it's similar to https://joinmastodon.org/verification ? A two sided reference between identity and profiles?
    
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zalgotext@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yeah I don’t think this is gonna get anywhere when the easiest alternative to controlling your account is to just host your own Lemmy instance, and you can do that literally right now with no changes to Lemmy or the protocol.

It’d be nice for ActivityPub to support optional GPG signatures for those that want to have that level of control. That would get you all the identity verification that this new fangled did stuff gets you, with the added bonus of GPG being a reliable, existing, proven technology that people already know how to support.

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Did also allows portable identity so ur home instance is whatever instance u feel like. Did has been tested and proven reliable its in use by lots of different applications.
  
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int32@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
yeah, that’s doable, I would do it like this: DIDs could just be cryptographic signing keys, and your client could just sign all your posts, and send it to any server, which will federate that. same with the upvotes/downvotes(timestamps will have to be signed so a server could not just replay an upvote or downvote if you change your mind) in this case, servers will only be useful for naming(and keeping the bio and public signing key) and relaying the messages to other servers.

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  DID already exist they are a Decentralised IDentiy (DID) it is a keypair and user data so usernames, profile, bio, and a list of accounts across different instance that allows associating post comments likes etc.
  
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rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s essentially how ATProto does it and they publish other instance actors under “also known as” in the did. that’s essentially what im proposing.
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I like how the did field is in addition to the existing actor field, providing a way to gradually transition the protocol to the new way.
    
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Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This could be easily solved with domain name and certificates

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- muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  what by having all users exist on a centralised server? That sounds like vendor lock in which is exactly what federation was trying to avoid.
  
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Implementing Portable User Identities with DIDs

Comments

Why not GPG!!??