Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Easy user mobility should be a goal of decentralized protocols and platforms. That would help users leave one provider and join another if/when the need arises. If I join Server A today as User A, I should be able to carry my identity as User A to another server or provider in the future without losing the ability to still remain in touch with everyone I was in touch with or having to tell them that my address has changed. This would be similar to email where one owns a domain but can move it around to any provider (or self-host) for storing and managing the content.

I have generally observed that some initial servers for a decentralized platform get more users over time and remain the largest, while later and/or smaller ones may not get attention, and could possibly even close down because of low usage.

View on HN

This is one of the primary benefits of using Blockstack. The Blockstack naming system is used to associate an immutable user identity with the routing path to their storage, for reads and writes. The data is stored in your own gaia hub which you control which apps can write to, you can revoke access, delete your data, or take your data with you. We are working to make it more user friendly but you can read about it here: https://docs.blockstack.org/storage/overview.html

The identity is stored on the strongest blockchain and can be linked to your gaia hub.

"initial servers for a decentralized platform get more users over time and remain the largest, while later and/or smaller ones may not get attention, and could possibly even close down because of low usage" while we host our own nodes, in general the nodes in our network are selected based on a random walk graph and bias away from having a few nodes.

Hubzilla[1] has a a feature called "Nomadic Identity" which seems to be a solution to your use case of carrying your identity to another server.

See the "Nomadic Identity and Cloning" paragraph on the Hubzilla homepage [2]. See also "Nomadic identity, brought to you by Hubzilla," by Andrew Manning, on Medium [3].

[1] [2] https://hubzilla.org/

[3] https://medium.com/@tamanning/nomadic-identity-brought-to-yo...

Edit: Newline formatting.

Mastodon has this. SSB doesn't, because your identity is just your message chain and key pair on your computer.

Mastodon doesn’t seem to have a way to move a user account and still have others message or tag one in the same way as before. When you switch from, say mastodon.social to mastodon.xyz, it’s almost like switching from Yahoo Mail to Gmail. There seems to be a way to export one’s following list and move that to the new instance, but this does require informing others of the address change on one’s account.

See https://medium.com/@jimpjorps/a-non-computer-persons-guide-t...

Have I misunderstood how this works?

If you've moved, your followers don't automatically follow you to your new home. But IMO that is fine. If I was following someone on cat.photo.space I might not want to follow them if they move to callgirls.xxx .

IIRC, you get a warning if you try to interact with someone who has moved.

Is it possible to operate a lightweight forwarding service, so my address is portable across servers?

That wouldn't be much different from operating a server yourself, so while it's not impossible, it's more a question of what benefits it provides.

An important feature is maintaining your social network after a fallout with your admin.

I don't want no one to tell me what to do and to prevent that I've got to prevent people from having leverage with me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com