[doytch]

Listen I'm not a crazy huge fan of a lot of new tech, but this is pretty transformational. When reading the first article [1] I was struck by the fact that it granted so much new freedom to your "social identity" on the internet. The comparison to hosting providers was incredible, because imagine you building a website and posting your thoughts there or starting a business there...and then immediately being shut down and all your data lost because of some arbitrary change of policy at your "host".

Everyone always talks about how your Google account being tied to logins is scary because you can get arbitrarily locked out. This protocol makes something like functionally impossible since /you/ control your data.

[1] https://overreacted.io/open-social/

[card_zero]

> Bob, however, isn’t technical. He doesn’t even know that there is a “repository” with his “data”. He got a repository behind the scenes when he signed up for his first open social app.

> Bob uses a free hosting service that came by default with his first open social app.

> If she owns alice.com, she can point at://alice.com at any server.

But does Bob own bob.com? That sounds beyond Bob's abilities and interest level. So Bob is stuck on one platform, in practice, and it's full other Bobs who are also stuck. The "free hosting service" (why is it free?) is now the gatekeeper. It may let him switch platforms.

[beeflet]

Even if bob "owned" bob.com, that amounts to a row in some centralized database somewhere.

[beeflet]

Did they invent the idea of a keypair?