Submitted 2 months ago by malloc@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/activitypub-nomadic-identity/
When Lemmy was making waves last year when Reddit pulled an “enshittification” of the platform. One of the first things I noticed was how terrible the experience was when trying to navigate to other Lemmy instances.
Hopefully this will help bridge the gap when it becomes generally available.
Great ideas and great work by everyone all around … but I don’t trust anyone … I also don’t trust that they’ll stay trustworthy forever either.
I would feel better if stories like this gave us background on the people involved. Who is Mike Macgirvin? I don’t want the person to dox themselves but I do want to know where he came from, what work he’s done before, what companies he’s worked for and what kind of people, organizations or groups he has worked with in the past. What school, university or program did he come out of? How old is he? What nationality? Where does he live and work now?
The more I know about the work that these people want to do, the more I would actually trust them.
Otherwise, everyone is just vaguely talking about bells and whistles, good intentions and wanting to do what’s best according to them … and at this point in social media evolution, we’ve seen enough characters like this who build something great, steer it to dangerous directions, sell out and leave us all hanging onto to nothing all over again.
Which is why, I don’t think I’ll ever want to create a trackable single user account for anything, no matter how great it may be … I’d rather scroll through all this anonymously, dump my account at any given movement and restart a new one because I really don’t care about carrying any history or trackable content on myself for any length of time. I already did that with four accounts on Reddit (which I cleared and dumped before leaving) … I’m doing that now on three accounts on Lemmy and a few others on other instances and I really don’t mind losing them, restarting them or creating new ones in the future.
I don’t trust anyone on social media any more … and I don’t think I ever will.
I would feel better if stories like this gave us background on the people involved. Who is Mike Macgirvin? I don’t want the person to dox themselves but I do want to know where he came from, what work he’s done before, what companies he’s worked for and what kind of people, organizations or groups he has worked with in the past. What school, university or program did he come out of? How old is he? What nationality? Where does he live and work now?
Did you miss the interview linked in the article? They interviewed Mike Macgirvin a few years back, and it goes into some of the background you’re wondering about.
Why do you need so much info on Mike? Can’t you just evaluate his statements/work on its own merit? The whole point of open source, federated platforms is that you don’t have to trust him. If he decides to enshittify it, you can just go with a fork or another instance. A nomadic identity isn’t a centralized alternative to the fediverse, it’s just a way of bringing some of the features of a centralized identity to a decentralized one (at least, that’s the way I interpreted the article).
baduhai@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
This is good news! Ever since I found or about nomadic identities I’ve wondered why they weren’t a thing from the beginning in the Fediverse. It just makes t so much sense in a federated environment.
DharmaCurious@startrek.website 2 months ago
adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev 2 months ago
I mean, the linked article does a pretty good explanation?