Just a random thought experiment. Let’s say I have my account on a lemmy instance: userA@mylemmy.com. One day I decide to stop paying for the domain and move to userA@mynewlemmy.com, and someone else gains it and also starts up a lemmy instance.

If they make their own userA@mylemmy.com, how do federated instances distinguish who’s who?

Have I misunderstood the role of domain names in this?

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You have instance

    Let’s stop it here. Instances are completely irrelevant in my idea.

    but different instances as the keys don’t match

    *sigh* The keys are in the Actor objects and in the Action objects and not in the instance. You cannot validate any instance, you cannot validate if an action was performed on a specific instance. You cannot prevent actors of the same name after the previous instance was wiped.

    All you can do is validating if an action was performed by an actor existing at the time the action was perfoed and that both were signed with a specific key.