this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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This sounds like it's unreasonably hard to implement for only marginal gain.
There is no good way you could safely handle the certificate key in your browser, as it executes JavaScript code from the instance. If you're giving your certificate key to that code to sign the message, you have to trust that code, or review it, every time you browser downloads it.
It would work with apps, as you only have to trust the app distributor, but the number of certificates and app users is even smaller.
If you're worried about malicious admins, then you should leave the instance too, and it'll most likely also get defederated by most instances very quickly. If you think your instance admins are planning on becoming malicious in the future, you should switch instances asap.
If you want to protect against third parties gaining access to your account, two factor authentication is a much cleaner way to prevent unauthorized users from abusing your account, by preventing them from gaining access.
If you're worried about an instance going down and people not recognizing you, you can create an additional account on a different instance in advance, or, since only a handful of people will care that you're still the same person, you can give them some other way of communicating.
And, if you think about it, most of the Reddit refugees lost their accounts in the migration too, so even if Lemmy was a single large instance/company, your account is always at risk.
Most likely, instances won't shut down immediately, but have some date set, during which you can migrate/download what you need to.
I think it's technically possible to do it in a sane way. I don't know if it currently exists in any form (I guess it kind of does for U2F keys / client side certificates?) but your browser itself could manage encryption keys, or could interface with hardware keys to sign messages. Then the JavaScript never gets to see the keys and could just request that you sign something (and presumably you need UI to know what you're agreeing to sign in the browser so you don't have to trust the random JS about what it wants to sign). It sounds like a perfectly reasonable browser feature to me, especially in an era of passkeys and stuff.
Of course it wouldn't be worth implementing in the browser just for Lemmy, and there's other problems like syncing keys (maybe you'd just sign your other keys to establish trust)... But such an API would be useful for other situations too (e.g., signing commits on github). Cryptographic signatures seem really niche, but people use them all the time behind the scenes, and I think it's something that would actually be really useful to inform the general public of more... They kind of solve problems that I think most people would think are impossible to solve. I mean, obviously we're not going to throw normal people at GnuPG and call it a day, but with some communication and UI effort I think they could be a valuable asset for society.