We'll always have an unbearable amount of centralization in the fediverse as long as we're reliant on DNS and SSL Certificate Authorities to glue it together

@cwebber

DNS is inherently federated though. It only SEEMS centralized because most people don't run their own DNS. We could easily set up a social DNS that uses a different set of tlds (for compatibility with existing DNS) if everyone could agree on how to deal with disputes--and then tell their computers to prefer that DNS.

SSL is a bit harder, but you don't *HAVE* to use external CA. Every instance could be self-signed--though this poses its own problems.

@rdh I'm friends with the main person behind SSL/TLS (Christopher Allen) who was opposed to CAs. There's an alternate system that was in the work called SPKI/SDSI (pronounced "spooky/sudsy"). There are alternate solutions, but they aren't well known because they aren't the ones that took off.

@cwebber @rdh
Web 2.0 of Trust

@jordyd @rdh haha, I'm going to start calling Rebooting Web of Trust that

@cwebber @rdh
Now I gotta go see what that is. I suspect it’s exactly what it says it is but you never know

@jordyd @rdh it's a "workshop" conference I go to where a lot of the "ways out of this mess" are being incubated, including DIDs (Decentralized Identifiers), ocap-ld, and the petnames writeup I recently participated in (still need to finish that one...) all came out of there

@jordyd @rdh we really need more fediverse people showing up to Rebooting Web of Trust fwiw

@cwebber @jordyd

Do you mean this? http://www.weboftrust.info/

@rdh @jordyd I also wrote a paper for the conference about how AP and this work could get along https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-fall2017/blob/master/final-documents/activitypub-decentralized-distributed.pdf

It's fairly out of date though

@rdh @jordyd Also might as well link this while I'm at it, here's a paper on petnames we never finished but has the core ideas https://github.com/cwebber/rebooting-the-web-of-trust-spring2018/blob/petnames/draft-documents/making-dids-invisible-with-petnames.md

If you can understand that, you can start to understand how to kill CAs and DNS.

@cwebber @rdh
That's a very neat idea