Mike Macgirvin

- an alternative to comment forgery is to provide 'relay identities' which are essentially proxy identities on the forum system which can participate as equals on the walled networks. This will provide a more seamless member and content experience (across all of the federated protocols) but there will be difficulties in social interaction (making friends, etc.). Granted these interaction problems will exist no matter how it is architected since the walled networks do not recognise or know how to communicate with networks outside of their own.

In this model a Diaspora forum member (for instance) can post on a red/hubzilla forum which also contains ActivityPub members. Comments/likes which are sent to the ActivityPub network will be sent by a pseudo-identity which appears to originate on the red/hubzilla site. The profile photo and profile URL and name will be that of their Diaspora identity. The 'actor' object and signing keys however will point to a faked entry on the Hubzilla site. The same would happen going the other way from the ActivityPub walled network to the Diaspora walled network. In this case a webfinger request would respond with the proxy key and a fake hcard.

Care would have to be taken for each protocol to provide the bare essential information that would allow comments/likes to validate successfully on the (target) walled network and where possible redirect to the original site for making connections if the destination site was multi-protocol enabled.