this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
3 points (80.0% liked)

Fediverse

28528 readers
233 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

This may be a very stupid idea, and I know blockchain has a bad reputation for scams, but I was wondering how viable the Internet Computer blockchain might be for a Fediverse universal ID. From what I read on their website, data is much cheaper to host on their blockchain (something like 70 million times less than on Ethereum). It is also possible to host entire websites with Wasm on it). So here are my questions:

  • Is there an ongoing effort to make a universal ID for the Fediverse or are we not there yet?
  • Does blockchain have its place in the Fediverse, not necessarily for crypto, but for decentralized data storage.
  • Do you think something like the Internet Computer blockchain could serve as a universal ID for the Fediverse?

Again, sorry if this is a dumb post, I am really new to the concept of this space as a whole.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

IMO what you're really describing is a cryptographically secure way to signify that I am the person you think I am. Some sort of PGP implementation within user profiles would be really interesting. Posts and comments could be signed by a key. Then, assuming you trust my home instance because of https certificates, your client could look up my PGP key directly from my profile and verify the signature to confirm that a rogue instance hadn't impersonated me.

It's not blockchain but I actually think that would be a really cool feature.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You could create an ED25519 keypair, then with each post, produce a sha256 hash of the post, create a signature of the hash using your private signing key, then include the signature with the post. Anyone could easily verify the signature with the verify key. You could add the verify key to a personal site or something.