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in reply to @cactus's post:

isn't there a horrifying enterprise nonsense standard for signing XML based on the actual data model rather than the textual representation? maybe we're overdue for the shitty JWT ecosystem version of that. or maybe it already exists; unfortunately, there is no way of knowing

i don't think it's necessarily fair to say that federation is the problem here. i think it's fairer to say that federation has been made harder by technologies and educations that just ignore it as a valuable possibility

it seems like the problems outlined here may just come from cryptocurrency brain rot (ie. building a complete history instead of a coherent state), and nothing fundamental to the ideal of computers being able to talk to each other

although i guess if people can't imagine it it can't happen

if i want to delete something, in a centralized system, i only have to trust that the central server will respect that, and i am probably at least aware of the organization that runs that server. but i have yet to see a federated system where deletion doesn’t require trusting every random server that has ever seen anything. one could argue that jumping through massive technical hoops to avoid needing to trust a central system, only to then put nearly or exactly as much trust in way more people with more incentive to be untrustworthy, is itself a form of cryptocurrency brain rot

that's an entirely different problem???

like if a service host is still broadcasting something because it ignores or never got a "delete this" flag, that's one thing, because that service host will continue to distribute it until it does

if a client has something that was deleted, then whoever has that client has to explicitly decide to share and forward it on, their client isn't capable of serving requests to random people

A lot of these federated protocols seem to memory-hole the idea of previous standards existing through RFC.
You can learn a lot about the pitfalls of previous standards by skimming through them, not even the obscure ones just look at IRC.