from Hacker News

Mastodon and Keybase

by malgorithms on 4/15/19, 8:18 PM with 184 comments

  • by zach43 on 4/15/19, 9:20 PM

    Just wanted to say that i moved from twitter to mastodon sometime late last year amd couldn't be happier with it. Keybase integration is interesting to me, but not realky useful since i don't want to tie mastodon with my real life identity.

    the Fediverse as a whole has a very different 'feel' to it compared to Twitter. Twitter feels significantly more commercialized amd stressful...mastodon / pleroma feel a lot more relaxed and pleasant in comparison.

    Maybe i just accidentally joined nicer communities, but i see a lot of small-scale chitchat and genuineness on mastodon than i rarely see on twitter.

    I've also had zero issues with the platform from a technical perspective...overall i think Mastodon, etc have done decentralization "right", and have a lot of potential for growth in the future

  • by founderling on 4/16/19, 5:34 AM

    This seems backward.

    They want ActivityPub servers to apply to a central service (keybase) to offer cross server identities.

    And they want users to trust that central service to decide who is who.

    It's always amazing, how strong the force of centralization is.

    Even when the whole value proposition of a technology is that it is decentralized, users will soon flock to centralized services built around it and end up in the mercy of a few organizations again.

    Reminds me of all the people who think they hold crypto currency while in reality they "hold" yeah-we-promise-we-owe-you-somethings by some exchange.

    Reminds me of how little resistance the Ethereum elite faced when they flushed "code is law" down the toilet and forced all users to switch to a fork with rewritten history.

    What makes this attempt of centralization even more tragic is that it does not bring anything to the table. If you want to run a service that let's people claim they are joedoe@host1 and joe_the_doe@host2, just let them publish two messages. "I am joedoe@host1" on joe_the_doe@host2 and "I am joe_the_doe@host2" on joedoe@host1. Neither the integration with the hosts nor the crypto spiel is needed.

  • by mirimir on 4/15/19, 9:31 PM

    This is great. But damn:

    > Are there sites you won't link to?

    > Like a Mastodon instance, we reserve the right to work with whichever partners we prefer. We specifically will avoid at least these sites:

    > sites which encourage or are known for illegal activity

    Just what is "illegal activity"? According to whose laws?

    Given that Keybase servers are in the US, I suppose that means US law. And frankly, that sucks.

    But please do clarify.

  • by ocdtrekkie on 4/15/19, 8:58 PM

    I wonder if the Mastodon community will pick up Keybase chat as the de facto chat option with this integration in place. Chat or private messaging has always been considered the weak link of the fediverse since it's easy for bad servers to mishandle "private" toots.
  • by wut42 on 4/15/19, 9:12 PM

    This sucks -- not all Mastodon instances will be able to use this. It's subject to approval by keybase, ensuring only big instances can use this. A step backwards a proper decentralized network…
  • by Leace on 4/15/19, 8:42 PM

    From: https://keybase.io/docs/proof_integration_guide

    > To send us the config, you can send us the public URL for your config file or attach it directly in a Keybase chat message to @mlsteele or email miles@keyba.se. In our example the file is hosted at https://keybase.io/.well-known/example-proof-config.json.

    Will this always require manual step (sending config by e-mail) or is there some automation planned?

  • by gtt on 4/15/19, 9:06 PM

    I never understood keybase as a useful product. What do you use keybase for?
  • by bloopernova on 4/15/19, 10:15 PM

    Keybase is certainly interesting. Is it possible to link up to your stackoverflow identity yet?

    How are people using Keybase right now? I added several of my accounts but I'm especially interested in the GPG encryption/signing.

  • by waferedpie on 4/17/19, 12:37 PM

    Can someone explain Mastodon to me? Because I’m not really sure I “get” it.

    As I understand it, I need to register for Mastodon at some server ``foo``, and with this one single registration I can also access other servers ``bar`` and ``baz`` and read what their members post, but I’m not able to post on those servers myself, only on my original ``foo`` server.

    So what happens when ``foo`` goes under for whatever reason? Or what if the admins at ``foo`` decided to ban me from their server for whatever reason? Am I just shit out of luck now?

    And what if my friends decide to join Mastodon some time later, but they all agree to join ``bar`` leaving me the odd person out? I think I’ve read somewhere that it’s not possible to relocate my ‘home server’?

  • by AgentME on 4/16/19, 4:39 AM

    Bug report: I just connected my Mastodon.social and Keybase profiles. On my Keybase profile, the "post" link next to my Mastodon.social profile link doesn't go directly to the proof post, but instead just links to my profile again.
  • by forgotmypw3 on 4/16/19, 12:38 AM

    I'm working on a web-based system that uses PGP key as identity.

    How do I integrate with Keybase?

  • by s09dfhks on 4/17/19, 5:38 PM

    I'm not entirely sold on keybase.

    Why would I want my online presence 100% identifiable and traceable back to me?

    What is the appeal of this service exactly?