Fediverse-Ideas #41: Bring Your Own IDentity (BYOID)

POSSE: I posted this in “fediverse-ideas” as Bring Your Own IDentity (BYOID) #41, on 2023-09-23. Comments are included below.

Related to development of all social (people-focused) communications and sharing systems, fediverse included.

Own Domain

We can't build people-oriented social tech in the way that Big Tech do, where they say “this is our system, you'll have an address @ our-big-tech-domain, and all your links belong to us.”

Earlier today I replied to Johannes Ernst who observed that people shouldn't need to think about the difference between someone's fediverse handle and their email address, they should be the same. I wrote,

@J12t Absolutely! We should just need “my address”. I've been writing about aspects of this. And it's strongly tied in with the value of having one's own address at one's own domain. Don't want my email addr to be me @ mastodon, nor my fediverse to be me @ gmail :–) rather I want them both me @ my-domain. And to make that efficient and affordable, servers (and server operators) must support Bring Your Own Identity #BYOID .

https://wrily.foad.me.uk/tag:ownDomain​

Own Domain is a truly cross-platform issue. It applies to matrix just as to fediverse and others. It's about bringing the person to the centre.

A recent key insight I had was actually “my own” registered domain isn't necessary. A substantial part of the value is in having an address at a domain that isn't belonging to a particular one of the service providers we use, but in having the use of an address at a domain that belongs to someone, anyone, whom we trust to let us use it for the long term. Could be a company, one's government, a charity. The key is to be able to switch and mix service providers without borrowing a new and different address from each one.

Main issues include:

I'm presupposing, by bringing up this topic in this forum, that a majority of readers here will understand the reasons why this direction makes sense. (That's something I have tried to write about on my blog but, though I try, explaining and appealing to normies to understand the importance is not my forté.)

I feel like we're missing something, that having all my different protocol addresses matching isn't merely about being easy to remember, it's not a trivial nicety. It's somehow a key to building deeper integration of our personal data within our personal tech. It's hard to think of use cases that can't be achieved by linking to external sites the way we do now, but my intuition is integration can be done better this way.

And I think BYOID goes a huge way towards solving the account “portability” issue.

Yet our delightful new federated things, wonderful in themselves, are yet, still, being built as big tech mono-sites: “join us and get our lovely service at our address” (mastodon.anything, fedi-thing.whatever, matrix-circles, matrix.org, beeper.com, on and on add infinitum).

Only a few rays radiate in the right direction:

(I thought I'd be able to name more.)

Running the service oneself, be it email or fedi or matrix, isn't easy. I self-host only in order to bring my own domain, not because I want to. Currently without self-hosting I explain it as I'm Unable To Be Me .

Discussion:

Related:

(EDIT 2023-12-23: Typo “people should –> shouldn't need to think”.)

glyn commented 2023-12-12:

Another advantage of BYOID would be to retain one's identity when migrating accounts between servers, as happens in the fediverse.

I can see the attraction of using domain names as identities as it leverages the current DNS infrastructure. However, it seems that the requirements for BYOID are fewer than those of domain names, so a much cheaper solution could be found.

Have you looked at identities via keyoxide.org and similar technology?

circlebuilder commented 2023-12-13:

FYI There's an issue on Federating Keyoxide.

glyn commented 2023-12-21:

One aspect is puzzling me. How would BYOID work when applied to more than one type of ActivityPub service, e.g. microblogging on a Mastodon instance and photo sharing on a pixelfed instance?

For example, if I used BYOID on both a Mastodon and a pixelfed instance, which instance would my id refer to? Or, putting it a other way, how could I refer to myself on one or other of the instances?

julianfoad commented 2023-12-23:

@glyn: Bring Your Own ID does not mean we have only one ID we can bring. We can still use a separate ID for each service. Let's say my preferred handle is “julian”. I can bring “julian@toot.mydomain” to the microblogging service, and bring “@julian@pix.mydomain” to the pixelfed service. (Or any other format that works, perhaps “@julian+{toot,pix}@mydomain”.) The essential point is that these ids are under my control (perhaps delegated to some third-party of my choosing) rather than controlled by the provider of my “toot” and “pix” services.

So, that's the first level.

In addition, I also write about how I would like to use one and the same ID for multiple services, here and in some of my blog posts. That's a more involved thing than Bring Your Own ID. I would like to explore that further but haven't yet, beyond observing that the syntax differences across different protocols (like whether to write a leading '@' sign) are superficial.

#ownDomain #POSSE #fediverse #matrix

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