Mastodon's federation introduces UX challenges.
One that worries me a lot is about message forgery. Anyone can forge a twoot, even cross-server.
Whereas Twitter Inc might be trustworthy enough to not forge transcripts. Anyone can run a Mastodon server and might want to abuse it to influence people (see Russian troll campaigns).
Should Mastodon "home servers" cryptographically sign updates? Should there be end-to-end signatures? Anyone has thoughts on this?
@fj In my opinion, with the advent of blockchains, every federated network in existence should consider if they should be running on a blockchain instead. Federation was the best solution in 1982 (SMTP), 1985 (DNS) and 1988 (IRC), but is it the best solution now? Many of Mastodon's challenges, including this one, would be easy to solve with distributed ledgers (blockchains), hashes and keys.
