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by error503 892 days ago
Fundamentally this verification is based on your contact list, which is formed from people you already know and have added to your contacts, so there's not really any need for a centralized trust. Presumably you trust the e-mail address of the contact you added, and the federation protocol could easily define how the authoritative hash/key for each user would be shared based on their e-mail.

In most cases this could also be resolved at first contact in meatspace, directly between the devices when establishing contact via the typical ways users share contact information - QR code or some form of short range networking, or even with an SMS challenge.
1 comments
lxgr 891 days ago
> the federation protocol could easily define how the authoritative hash/key for each user would be shared based on their e-mail

That really doesn't sound that easy in a federated protocol.

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error503 889 days ago
Really? It doesn't seem to me like it gets any more trivial than 'hit DNS for the domain to find federation server, send a GET request' to me. You could even do the whole thing with DNS, though that has privacy implications. What am I missing?
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