Fedi v2

Referenced by: Social Media

My take on a theoretical successor to federated Social Media

Inspiration

• A Plan for Social Media - Rethinking Federation
  • This article doesn't address many implementation details:
    • If the server is a relay, can content not be viewed anonymously?
    • How to handle storing large amounts of data on every client?
    • Don't you still need to associate with a server for people to direct their messages to?
• Single-user Mastodon Instance is a Bad Idea
  • Focuses on the non-feasibility of self hosting, contributing to Federated Social Media not actually having all the upsides it should theoretically have by virtue of being Decentralized
• The Commune community
• Existing protocols:
  • Nostr
  • ATProto
• A lot of these ideas are learned lessons from the usenet days

Weird may eventually move in the direction of implementing something like this

• Next Gen Federation on Iroh: Graph Data & Linked Documents Layers

Identity

• Federated Identity
• Private and public keys anyone can create and store how they want
  • Fully free to create and store with no server dependencies
• Profile information
  • Sent as a signed message through all the relays
  • How would you trust a username?
    • Petnames could be used to display human readable names via contacts or decentralized "naming hubs"
    • In most conversations online, you can trust their display name and add them as a contact as that display name
      • You only need to verify they are the same person you interacted with previously
      • You only need to trust people you want to send money to or otherwise "important identities"
      • For important identities, you can trust your contacts forming a chain of trust, or a authoritative naming hub
        • E.g. a white house ran naming hub that verifies the identities of the president and people of Congress
        • People typically wouldn't reach out to a naming hub, as it's not typically necessary
      • Contacts supercede naming hubs, so if a naming hub is breached, anyone I've previously added as a contact is still the source of truth
        • This only fails if the private key itself was breached
      • I'm just thepaperpilot, my display name. For most online communication, this is sufficient
        • My website can have a nameserver saying this publickey is the same as the site owner
        • If I write a paper at a scientific journal, they can say the author of x paper is my publickey
• How to handle losing your private key
  • If you do have a naming hub you can verify with, they can say the identity has a new publickey
  • Contacts can "vouch" for a identity having a new publickey
  • Clients can decide to trust the new publickey based on contacts and naming hubs saying to
  • Also applies to stolen or compromised keys
• I believe Iroh works this way

Servers

• Act as relays, merely storing messages and sending them to any clients or servers that have subscribed
• May decide to publicly display messages its received
  • These servers are how discovery would work
  • Different servers may offer unique displays, filters, etc.
• Users can send their content to any server - no authentication or account required, as the identity suffices
  • Even replies can work this way - no need to know from where a given message originated
• Private servers could require some password when sending messages or subscribing to things
  • Useful for a school or other entity that wants an internal social network
• Different ways to subscribe to a server's messages
  • All messages the relay hears about (new relays essentially subscribe like this to some existing relay)
  • All messages from a specific poster ID
  • Any replies to a message created with a specific poster ID
  • Shallow subscriptions, to lighten the load when subscribing to communities

Content

• Protocol should dictate how to convey text, image, audio, video, and binary content
• Protocol should include reacting to content with arbitrary text, including a URL
  • Upvotes and downvotes are implemented with this system
• Each message contains fields for the poster's ID (public key) and a signature that verifies the content was made by that poster
  • That signature serves as an ID for the message itself
    • Anything can be replied to using the ID as the "parent" property in a new post
• Edits are handled as replies with some flag to indicate it's updating the parent messages' content
  • Naturally, this reply would only be respected if it matches the same creator ID
  • Servers should replace the original message entirely with this one and indicate its an edited message
    • Some servers will inevitably keep a full history though
• Groups/communities are just specially flagged messages
  • Posting to a community is just replying to that message
  • Subscribing to a community is just subscribing to that message
  • The original message creator effectively owns the group

Moderation

• In general, edits and delete requests are made by replying with a specially flagged message
• Edit and deletion messages are ignored unless they have the correct public key and signature
  • Parent messages form a hierarchy of permission - if someone replies to your message, you can send a delete request for that message
  • Relay owners cannot fully delete messages, but can choose to stop relaying replies etc. of messages as the server owner wishes
• Posts can be publicly reported with a specially flagged reply
  • How to make anonymous reports?
• Users can send deletion or edit messages even without a matching public key, and clients (or relays) can choose to respect those messages if that public key is whitelisted as a moderator
  • Messages (and by extension, groups) can have replies granting or removing permission to other public IDs at that hierarchy level
  • People can setup accounts with their desired heuristic for sending delete messages, such as looking at public reports or analyzing the content with AI
    • This way clients can effectively customize their preferred moderation
• Clients can also choose to add additional rules for hiding content, such as any reports by followed users
• Perhaps delete messages pull double duty as public reports in and of themselves?

Problems to solve

• No anonymity
  • All upvotes, downvotes, etc. are linked to your public key
  • Perhaps a client could generate new keypairs for every action for anonymity, but then it'd be hard to determine if such an account and action was a genuine user or a bot
• Servers could probably determine the identity of clients sending their messages to them
  • A client that only ever sends messages with a specific public key is unlikely to be a server
  • A client that doesn't subscribe to all messages is unlikely to be a server
• Illegal material will likely be placed on the hard drive at least temporarily
  • Messages will be downloaded and, even if you follow a moderator bot that looks for illegal material, there's likely to be a delay between receiving the initial message and receiving the bots delete message
• You have to download all spam messages
  • For redundancy, you'd likely subscribe to multiple relay servers
  • You cannot trust several relay servers to have identical rules on not relaying messages that don't pass whatever moderation heuristic
  • Therefore, the filtering out of spam has to be done by the client, after downloading it all