Difference between Federated and Decentralized Social
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I'm wondering if I should drop MeWe and just stay with Vivaldi Social. As they are now using Blockchain (and I don't know if I'm confusing that with BitCoin). But wondering the difference between Federated like Mastodon and decentralized social now with MeWe?
Vivaldi once endorsed MeWe before the pandemic as a privacy focused social media. But that was also before they got a new CEO and now this new direction.
Here is a link for context:
https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/04/26/social-media-app-mewe-to-bring-frequency-blockchains-self-sovereign-identity-to-its-20m-users/Also, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is an advisor to MeWe, however, he is creating Web3.0 and MeWe is moving to Web3. Here is an article that talks about the difference:
https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/11/21/inventor-of-the-web-sir-tim-berners-lee-wants-to-save-your-data-from-big-tech-with-web30Thanks!
Frank -
@doctorg Is my question here in the right place, or should it be moved to another category?
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@fjc1029 I think its is ok to post this here.
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@DoctorG Thank you for confirming.
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So I looked into it. If I understood everything correctly. WeMe is not going to be decentralized itself, it's purely going to be using a "Social Identity" that's meant to be used around different services as "decentralized". Which from one of their Medium article where they explain what it is:
The Social Identity includes a “universal handle” or username for each user. This universal handle is a name chosen by the user which is connected to the Social Identity itself, and may be accessed by any application on the Social Web.
It's a universal username handle, that's it. It's supposed to allow you to use the same username with the same "Social Identity" on a group of different apps. It seems to work like a centralized identification system, where there's one single place where the services take username handles from.
Mastodon (and the rest of the Fediverse) doesn't have and doesn't use a system like that, you can be on multiple instances (for example, one account on social.vivaldi.net and one on pixelfed.social) with the same username set but they'll all be completely separate from one another (it will be @[email protected] and @[email protected]).
You can contact people from different Mastodon instances when you are also on a different Mastodon instance (or any other Fediverse software, Mastodon isn't the only here), but you won't be able to contact people from separate WeMe "instances", because those don't exist.
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@fjc1029 MeWe is and always has been just a plain centralized service.
A self sovereign identity provides cryptographic verification that it's actually a certain entity who's posting on that (or any) platform.
Like using Github with GPG for signed commits.How data for such an identity must be structured and how to verify it actually maps to a physical (or legal) person is the problem many tried (with so far little success) to solve:
- web of trust (GPG)
- multiple fully trusted authorities (x509 certificates in browsers)
- pubkeys on a blockchain (Bitcoin, source of a transaction) or
- deterministically derived from verifiable data (Bitcoin, target of a transaction)
or any combination of those (Google certificate transparency, GPG web key directory, etc.), when the pure approach did not live up to its promise.