Who owns your ATProto identity?

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• Hacker News
• Is author new at the whole web thing? Yes, people trust remote web servers. Yes, if you link multiple apps to an identity server (be it atproto, google, or self-hosted OpenID server), and your identity server is compromised, attacker will be able to impersonate you or lock you out.

  This is just how the web works, and there is no easy around it without losing features people care about. Sure, you can do client-side encryption and pretend serve can't see the plaintext, but it's just a theatre, see Hushmail incident for example.

  And having people export uber-key by default is pretty terrible idea. Sure, allow advanced users (like post author) to do it. But for the common person, the exported key is just another way to get account compromised, via malware or backup provider hacking. Or if they are not backing up stuff, then the key will get lost next time they upgrade.

  by theamk
• Centralization is always a trap.

  No idea why people have such a hard time joining and supporting the Fediverse.

  by Noaidi
• So does a CA issuing my certificate, but there is some oversight in what they do.
  by Muromec
• Sure, somebody else holds your identity, but it's pretty easy to control it yourself. By its nature if you're using somebody to host your stuff, you're trusting them with it. I made Cirrus so you can self-host your PDS for free, but you still need to trust Cloudflare to run it.
  by ascorbic
• I think most people don’t need to worry about their host abusing its power to impersonate them, but the cool thing is, the people who do need to/want to worry (journalists, politicians, celebrities, activists, open source maintainers, etc etc etc) can self host a PDS and be a lot safer, and still interact with everyone else.
  by varun_ch
• One of the core features of AT is the ability to move your repo hosting provider (PDS) at any time. This is the "data portability" problem that ActivityPub never solved.

  Bluesky Social, PBC runs a PDS service (bsky.social) for free, there are a number of free public alternatives, and thousands of users self-host.

  Self-hosting your own PDS can be done with Raspberry Pi or $5/mo VM and requires very little work. It runs in a Docker container with SQLite.

  https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds

  by jacobgold
• Who owns your domain name? Hint: it’s probably not you. Your hosting provider could take down your domain, or even steal traffic and direct it to their own IPs
  by rbren
• Most people don’t worry about it for the same reason they don’t worry about GitHub abusing their GitHub account and are even willing to use “login with GitHub” to access their other accounts. Account takeover by a third party is a bigger risk. If you’re concerned about supply chain risks, there are more important concerns than “what if GitHub itself is a bad actor.”

  It’s solvable if you’re willing to self-host your PDS.

  But I’m skeptical of the attempts to make a PDS an “everything account.” Why should you use the same PDS for your social media posts and your git repos and your blog posts? Seems like we need to get better at locking things down in practice before that kind of centralization?

  by skybrian