Holos Social@HolosSocial@mastodon.social: @silverpill<br>The relay provides a stable identity and makes the device reachable through a tunnel.<br>The location of keys is not irrelevant. With custom domains, the user controls the domain and the identity. Relays become interchangeable, no Move activity needed. This is an architecture choice, not marketing.<br>@jandi @jupiter_rowland

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silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social (2026-04-03 06:15:11)
@jandi @HolosSocial @jupiter_rowland

The similarities are superficial.

Holos is a regular ActivityPub application, where user's identity is bound to a domain name. Having a Holos account is equivalent to running a single user instance and doing continuous database backups. The difference is in the software architecture, not in the protocol: the database is located on user's phone instead of the machine where the server is running.

The how-it-works page also talks about cryptographic keys "never leaving your device". This is just misleading marketing. The location of the keys is  irrelevant, because keys in ActivityPub are identified by URIs, and what an URI resolves to is controlled by a person who controls the server frontend and the domain name.
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Holos Social@HolosSocial@mastodon.social (2026-04-03 14:05:39)
@silverpill
The relay provides a stable identity and makes the device reachable through a tunnel.
The location of keys is not irrelevant. With custom domains, the user controls the domain and the identity. Relays become interchangeable, no Move activity needed. This is an architecture choice, not marketing.
@jandi @jupiter_rowland


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jandi@jandi@mastodon.social (2026-04-03 19:57:06)
@HolosSocial @silverpill @jupiter_rowland Thanks for answering. As a non-programmer, many details go over my head, but are interesting anyway... It's like reading Science-Nonfiction or something. A lot of interesting stuff is happening, there's great characters and a million wildly complicated backstories (where oneself is, somehow, involved!), but it's all true, and the "interesting stuff" can many times be fact checked and subject to proof, unlike in Sci-Fi.