DIDs in ActivityPub

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There’s a major effort happening in Fedify to replace HTTP(S) URIs with server-independent identifiers based on the DID standard.

The core idea is replacing HTTP(S) URIs with server-independent identifiers: ap:// URIs that use a Decentralized Identifier (DID) as the authority component, rather than a domain name. An object identified as ap://did:key:z6Mk…/actor can live on multiple servers simultaneously and survives any single server disappearing.

FEP-ef61: Portable Objects · Issue #288 · fedify-dev/fedify · GitHub

This is a very big deal for prospective interop between ActivityPub and atproto, since apps on either protocol could defer to the same DID-based identity.

I don’t necessarily want to bridge my Bluesky posts to my Mastodon posts, but I do wanna have the same (DID-backed) erlend.sh internet handle on both applications.

The fediverse has popularly referred to this form of account decentralization as Nomadic Identity. Mature implementations of this composite standard already exists in the likes of Mitra, but nothing mainstream yet.

Fedify is what powers the AP backend of Ghost, so this will be a whole different scale of adoption.

One to watch @snarfed.org

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Yeah, but this requires did:key which is honestly one of the most useless DID Methods for identity. Using did:webvh or did:plc would honestly be a more sound idea.

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Yep, but in any case at least it opens the door to using other DIDs right?

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