Yesterday I learned Fediverse Enhancement Proposals were mentioned in a W3C meeting of the Credentials Community Group, specifically FEP-c390 which has to do with Identity Proofs and is based on W3C's work on decentralized identifiers.
I didn't attend the meeting but made this summary as I read the logs: https://codeberg.org/weex/the-fediverse/wiki/Summary-of-W3C-Credentials-Community-Group-meeting-of-2022-11-29
Below I'll share some of my thoughts on what was discussed as a fedizen and supporter of open standards.
🧵👇 #FEP #Fediverse
During the meeting DIDs and VCs are posited to be an excellent mechanism toward each of us owning our social graph. It seems DIDs allow you to have many keys (I'm not sure if these can be disconnected sub-identities) attached to a single root identity.
I'd encourage people to learn more about DIDs, and this is my point, just because these things might be great solutions, that doesn't mean they'll win.
The market represented by users and software systems on the fediverse is beyond anyone's control, but it may get steered by dominant projects and high-profile people, even commercial enterprises with little interest in the fediverse's long-term health. So it's important to be aware of what's working and to feed what solves the most problems for the most people.
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FEP-c390 was mentioned by Dmitri during this meeting and for this I want to give a shout-out to everyone who's participated in setting up FEP at the beginning, keeping it online, and now everyone who's submitting more drafts, discussing proposals, and putting it all to use on the fediverse.
I've heard the internet described as nothing more than a stack of protocols and the fediverse seems a natural extension of that idea. It feels great to have this work validated and I'm excited by how many things we'll map out together whether that's in FEPs or W3C or wherever.
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The meeting opens with the proposition I paraphrase as "reputation is a dead-end, a problem nobody ever solves."
I don't know about you but this excites me.
When I hear something is impossible, maybe something people have given up on and never been solved, I can't help but want to look more into it.
For the problem of moderation on the Fediverse, I share the opinion that blocklists are not ideal and think a web-of-trust could work much better. It seems Freenet handled this well-enough to try and bring it over to the fedi, so if you're interested make this a reality in Mastodon, please get in touch!
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