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Reply to @reiver@mastodon.social
julian@julian@activitypub.space (2026-05-15 03:19:18)
@reiver@mastodon.social okay, fair, but I think dids are not a technically feasible solution because it is confusing for now (sorry @silverpill@mitra.social)


Maybe I just need to read up on DIDs and just do it... but domain names have the weight and inertia of decades of implementation.
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Evan Prodromou@evan@cosocial.ca (2026-05-15 03:32:03)
@julian @reiver @silverpill There are about 390M registered domain names. The system has, in fact, been used for decades. The Web and email depend on DNS.

Cryptographic keys as the root of identity are extremely hard for people to use -- about 10% of all Bitcoin wallets with money in them are lost for good. And there's actual money in those.

DNS >> cryptographic keys

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silverpill@silverpill@mitra.social (2026-05-15 04:22:32)
@evan @julian @reiver Cryptographic identity is also not a new technology, PGP was developed more than 30 years ago, and a lot has happened since then. Hardware keys, HSMs in smartphones, etc. And DIDs.

DID is an abstraction that allows key rotation and delegation of key management to a trusted 3rd party. Bluesky uses DIDs for identities but most of its users never touch a secret key.

Anyway, in Fediverse we don't need to choose between domain names and DIDs. We have both, because FEP-ef61 is a backward compatible protocol upgrade.