The role of mastodon.social in the Mastodon ecosystem
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/03/the-role-of-mastodon.social-in-the-mastodon-ecosystem/
@trwnh I don't know how you could change something so fundamental now.
@Gargron well it's really hard and also getting harder the more it isn't there. i'm pretty convinced that tying everything to domain names is a mistake that needs to be solved as soon as possible. activitypub ID shouldn't be the source of identity, it should be dereferenced to something else. two copies of identical data shouldn't be different just because they're on different computers.
@Gargron assuming a loosely semver scheme where mastodon 3 isn't fully backwards-comptible and contains network-level changes: you would need to start generating globally unique IDs and signing them with the actor public key, then let that change propagate through the network, then add UI in 3.0.0 to allow migration between servers. this is only possible with content addressing, because it's extremely expensive to regenerate IDs on thousands/millions of objects.
@oct2pus @Gargron data can still federate out of the "mastodon network" entirely as well, so it's still federation. on a user level no one should care how it works as long as they can continue to make posts and follow others. nowhere in the AP spec does it require absolute authority to the domain name; it simply requires that IDs be https uris on the domain namespace.
the problem is that every single implementation stops right there and assumes location = identity. they never fully dereference
@Gargron I don't think it needs to be necessarily like blockchain, but you could have a distributed database of posts, yeah. Relays could be Groups, with their own moderation and community. More IRC-like or Usenet-like replication. But the first step would be location-independent addressing. Where you sign up becomes part of your identity, in a way that is not easily changeable.