14 votes

Keybase ♥'s Mastodon, and how to get your site on Keybase

4 comments

  1. [3]
    mrnd
    (edited )
    Link
    Personally I find this cool, and the technical implementation is sensible. However, I'm slightly saddened that they want to approve every instance manually. I guess this is for legal reasons, but...

    Personally I find this cool, and the technical implementation is sensible.

    However, I'm slightly saddened that they want to approve every instance manually. I guess this is for legal reasons, but it's still disappointing.

    Oh, and I like the Mastodon introduction in the post. It rather effectively explains federation in few sentences.

    Keybase didn't explain itself in this post, so shortly about them: they provide centralized identity proofs (cryptographic proof that this Keybase account is both me@twitter.com, mrnd@best_mastodon_instance.qwr and reddit/u/someone) and also encrypted chat and file sharing based on those identities.

    This post explains how anyone could now build this kind of proof integration, so we could have, for instance, Keybase Tildes-account proofs ;)

    6 votes
    1. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. [2]
        mrnd
        Link Parent
        Yes, but they keep the right to not approve everyone: This is important for small Mastodon intances and some more controversial ones like instances for sex workers. But like I said, it probably...

        Yes, but they keep the right to not approve everyone:

        Like a Mastodon instance, we reserve the right to work with whichever partners we prefer. We specifically will avoid at least these sites:

        sites which encourage or are known for illegal activity
        sites which primarily link to advertisements
        sites which feel tiny and spammy. We don't want 10,000 partners with 5 members each; if you run, say, a family or apartment website, you don't need to do this integration. Just prove ownership of the domain in the old Keybase way, putting your family's proofs in yoursite.com/keybase.txt

        This is important for small Mastodon intances and some more controversial ones like instances for sex workers.

        But like I said, it probably was necessary for them.

        9 votes
        1. Deimos
          Link Parent
          On HN yesterday, Chris Coyne (one of the Keybase founders) said (in response to someone asking about the manual verification): So I guess they don't want people trying to use it as a spam/SEO method.

          On HN yesterday, Chris Coyne (one of the Keybase founders) said (in response to someone asking about the manual verification):

          Good q - this step will likely be automated soon. Still, there will always be one final step of our approving any integration, otherwise there would be 10,000 pr0n sites or ad sites. (We mention this in the FAQ.) But we can automate everything up to turning it on.

          So I guess they don't want people trying to use it as a spam/SEO method.

          3 votes
  2. cfabbro
    Link
    It's probably worth mentioning Deimos added this to Gitlab a few hour ago too: https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/422 edit: Oops, didn't notice Bauke mentioned it already. :P

    It's probably worth mentioning Deimos added this to Gitlab a few hour ago too:
    https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/422

    edit: Oops, didn't notice Bauke mentioned it already. :P

    6 votes