theoretical considerations on identity management

[gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de]

so, this is a bit of an abstract mathematical post.

I think that a fediverse service consists mostly of three parts: identity provider, data hoster, and feed provider.

The data hoster is the machine that hosts the posts and comments and upvote/downvote stats. The feed provider is the service which gives you a nice, scrollable overview over new content for you. This is today the same system that provides the data, but it could be separated, such as having a custom "search engine" that gives you content, that you use independently of where the data is stored.

The identity provider basically only makes a proof that "you are you" : you give it your login credentials and it gives you a kind of token that authenticates (proves your identity) to other services. like, i'm on discuss.tchncs.de, but i can post to lemmy.world. this is because the discuss.tchncs.de server says to lemmy.world that i indeed have this account on this server. so they prove my identity in a way.

What i argue now is that such an identity providing server is not technically necessary. You could use something like an ~/.ssh/id_rsa file that you generate on your own computer and use that public key to identify yourself on the fediverse. I don't think that this approach has any inherent advantages over how things are being done today, but it could be done that way and that in itself is fascinating.

:D