@macgirvin just followed-up to a related fediverse discussion on the subject, with:
Nomadic identity is nothing more than a full backup of your social profile, friends, settings, and content that is always kept up-to-date on one or more alternate instances. So if anything goes wrong with your chosen instance; anything at all – you can carry on like nothing happened.
And people think “choosing an instance” makes the fediverse complicated. That’s nothing compared to what happens if you choose the wrong instance or the admin decides they don’t like you. Nobody talks about this, because it can be devastating.
We provide a way to extract yourself and all your content from this situation. If you’re on Mastodon, you have no such safety net. If something goes wrong, you can migrate your friends if you have warning; otherwise your existence in the fediverse and everything you ever posted is gone. Forever.
Poof.
This has happened before. in 2011 it happened to nearly a half-million people in the space of a week or two. Most of these went back to either Facebook or Twitter and left the fediverse forever.
As for the current conversation, what allows an identity to be nomadic is that it isn’t permanently attached-to or associated-with a particular
- username, or
- DNS name
these things can change at any time, but you’re still you - no matter what instance or software brand you are using right now; and our own software tends to reflect this.
“Nomadic identity isn’t just a good idea. It’s a bloody great idea.”
And I gave the following response:
Nomadic identity is nothing more than a full backup of your social profile, friends, settings, and content that is always kept up-to-date on one or more alternate instances.
Now this is a clear definition, thank you! Fully aware of the problem and any good solution is a great idea
Where I was confused was the “identity” in the name, considered identity and data to be separate concepts. Moving all your content is more like a “Mobile home” facility. A name fit for ‘end-users’ too.
Or ‘nomadic homes’ as the name. Or ‘roaming profiles’ perhaps.
Proposal to rename this protocol capability
This definition of nomadic identity makes me a proponent to brainstorm a better name for this protocol capability, to avoid any confusions around existing identity concepts in other open standards and people’s own mental models of what identity is, both for developers and end-users alike.
There was further follow-up with Mike to address possible renaming..
I did explain how this was connected to identity towards the end. You kind of need nomadic identity to have nomadic homes.
Confusion that arises with me is in how I conceptually perceive the notion of self-sovereign identity. Namely as your identity in some digital representation, that is decoupled from the data you own and where it resides. Where SSI allows one to have nomadic homes just as well.
Maybe that is not the case in how the standards are developed and ‘something extra’ i.e. nomadic identity is required.
Either that or it may be better named to avoid the confusion with other uses of “identity”.
And Mike’s reply:
I guess the circular reference wasn’t a good idea. Let’s re-phrase that. You need a “portable identity” to implement nomadic homes. A “portable identity” is one that has doesn’t reference a DNS server and/or account. Because these aren’t really an “identity”, but rather a “location”. Your portable identity is something that identifies you, not the machine and account you happen to be posting from.
Me: The location independence is what I also associated with my notion of SSI conceptually, and then there are a plethora of ways to technically achieve it. Witness all the competing standards.
Do you think “portable identity” covers the load better?
I wondered earlier if this particular mechanism of portable identity was needed to overcome design choices in the protocol that tied identity to domain names? Which we must now live with and work around to keep backwards compat.
“Portable identity” would be a very good name. The protocol then has a “Portability” non-functional requirement which breaks down into separate mechanisms for portable identity and portable data. Where one depends on the other.