Ask HN: Wouldn't it make sense to use GPG as the activitypub user?

1 points by danhab99 3y ago ↗ HN

I was thinking about this while trying to use Mastadon. I don't get why I have to create an account on every Mastadon server just to read. The thing is that GPG is already a federated "user identification" system so why not use that to sign posts. And with Mastadon doing the ActivityPub thing I think GPG should spread to ActivityPub too. Think about it, this is what GPG was designed for.

3 comments

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wmf 3y ago ↗

It doesn't make sense to use GPG for anything because it's very obsolete. https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html

nl 3y ago ↗

The W3C DID spec enables private-key based identity in a generic way. It grew out of the ideas behind KeyBase.

There's a bunch of different DID methods, some of which use crypto ledgers to enable public key distribution. If that isn't what you want, the DID:key method[1] might be interesting.

[1] https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-method-key/

sp332 3y ago ↗

If someone wants to talk to you or like one of your posts, how would they know which server to send it to?