Why can’t we have federated identity to login into fediverse instead of creating login for each instance?
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Please tell me you haven’t been creating accounts on every instace. You can register on one instance then use that account to interact with content and communities on all other instances.
No, but some people are discussing about creating new logins, so I want to clarify. Thanks for the clarification.
Some people do make this mistake, I’ve seen a thread or two asking about it after they already started. We’ll need a proper solution eventually, likely education/tutorial-based.
The problem will stay there as long as lemmy links don’t automatically redirect to your instance in somr way.
True, but changing this is unfortunately unfeasible with the way the web works. If I just access the URL of a post on instance A, there is no reasonable way for it to know that my home instance is B.
There should at least be a button or something that sends you to your home instance after entering the domain though. Other than that, we’ll have to keep using browser addons and userscripts…
Literally every single explanation of Lemmy or fediverse that I have seen makes this really clear. I don’t understand where people would get the idea that you have to sign up to every site.
It is really clear until a newb tries to use it:
- Someone gives you a link, or you find it in search
- You click on the link, because that’s what you do with links
- It takes you to what you are looking for, but it says you have to log in to comment or vote
- You log in so you can comment or vote
The UX for interacting with off-instance subs is abysmal. What is even worse is that as far as I can tell, there is no way to link a post or comment that is instance relative / instance independent.
there is no way to link a post or comment that is instance relative / instance independent
I’m commenting mainly as a reminder to myself to check back later if someone comes in with a correction.
That said, the answer to this in the long term should be for the front ends (Lemmy UI, Jerboa, Sync for Lemmy, etc.) to be smart about this. My Mastodon app, Megalodon, does it. If you click a link to a post in another instance, it automatically looks up the same post from your instance and takes you there. It’s a little slower (and Megalodon shows you a button to short-circuit it and just go to that URL if you don’t care to be on your instance), but it lets you interact with the post as normal.
Even at the most basic level it is broken - at the bottom of your comment is a “context” button with the fediverse symbol. If I click on it, it won’t take me to the comment on my instance (lemmy.world) but instead is an absolute link to the comment on your instance (Aussie.world) even though the community lives on lemmy.world.
I love lemmy, and I think it has a bright future, but this fundamental problem really needs to be fixed.
You’re probably looking at the rainbow pentagon button, which behaves as you describe. There’s also a kind of chain link button. That one should take you to the context within your own instance. At least on web that’s how it works. Different apps may display differently.
The tooltip doesn’t help either - both links only have a tooltip that just says
link… IMHO it should beLink to this comment on CURRENT_INSTANCE_DOMAINfor the chain icon thing, andLink to this comment on COMMENTER_INSTANCEfor the rainbow thing.Anyway, the issue about this messy behavior described by @[email protected] is here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048
Because when you click a link out of link Google or something you try to login and it says your login doesn’t work. To actually view that page properly you have to copy the link go you home instance and search it again then go to the post and then you can interact with it. Some people either A. don’t realize that or B. Don’t understand that’s how it all functions. It confused the shit out of me for the first couple days but I just didn’t care enough to create a new account because my account “should” have worked there I just didn’t know how to make that happen.
The process to open a link on your home instance is just way too complicated right now. Some sort of browser presence could help redirect users to the right places.
Agreed I haven’t spent much time using Lemmy on an app but I’m hoping those can make it easier somehow atleast for mobile users.
Some sort of browser presence
It seems like it could be as easy as a redirect in Apache/nginx so that local-format links are laundered through.
And now we know how the Fediverse got all that users in the last period 😆
As a newb to Fediverse, I agree because it is ambiguous how to use one account for several instances. I’ve browsed the web for several hours. But I only found out that the above is not a one-size-fits-all because some instances require registration.
Also, saying that an account can be created to access communities in my experience, implies I can only see and minimally interact on those instances. But I cannot go as far as posting anything because as I previously stated, I need an account on the said instance to do that.
I see the Fediverse being an umbrella of apps/services. However, from my experience, they’re not synchronized. More like silos.
Yeah, it’s a bit of an issue, there’s a lot of concepts that can get subtly mis-communicated. I wrote this awhile ago, as I felt it helps navigate more intuitively when you have a full top-level view of the whole idea in the first place:
Yes but it’s a bit of a mess to interact with lemmy from a Mastodon account though.
No some communities need a new login. lemmy NSFW has no content without it. th there’s the issue of having a slow instance like world vs another instance
You don’t need a new a account for this, just make sure you have “Show NSFW” enabled in your profile.
Not exactly because some instances defederate other instances. I’m pretty sure lemmynsfw is defederated by some instances (like Beehaw I think??), meaning you’d need an account on another instance in order to most properly view and participate.
Beehaw is not defederated from lemmynsfw.
You’re right. I’m not sure why I thought they were. I wonder if they were temporarily at some point??? Or maybe I am just having a massive brain fart.
You might be thinking of lemmygrad or lemmyworld, there’s a lot of lemmynames around these days :)
Also it’s kinda practical to have an alt for lemmynsfw since account activity is openly available
PornLemmy.com shows all comment even without an account
Does lemmynsfw.com and pornlemmy.com federate?
I think they do
this is the sturm and drang of every collaborative work I guess. Those led by a single person / company will produce a more streamlined but restrictive product. Those led by committee produce a more chaotic but free experience.
Others have already said, but I will reinterate:
You have to go to your account settings and enable “Show NSFW”. It is off by default.
Nah, it’s been enabled, it’s literally just that instance that wont show anything without an account on their instance.
Unless you mean the setting for my *.world account can be on everywhere else but OFF on the *nsfw instance alone??
I have an account on .world and can see NSFW content from lemmynsfw…
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Yes, and no. You can access lemmy and kbin instances from mastadon. But the format doesn’t work so well I think. I’m not sure how far it goes and how viable it is though. I’m not on mastadon.
But once you have an account on one of the threadiverse instances, defederation aside the same content should be available.
Yeah I think the main actually viable use case for the fact that Lemmy and Mastodon can cross-interact is just when a Mastodon user gets @mentioned on Lemmy and is able to reply to it from there. And vice versa. You don’t want to actually be browsing Lemmy from Mastodon.
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From my understanding, yes. You can also follow Lemmy communities on mastodon and have their posts show up in your feed. @[email protected] I believe that’s the right format? Someone will undoubtedly correct me if I’m wrong.
Yes, you can. See my post I made on lemmy.world - showing up in the feed of @[email protected] using my mastodon.social account (in the mastodon app). For that to work you have to have the community address and look for it via the search on the mastodon instance.
Screenshot is made in the mastodon instance.
There’s a difference between a federated identify and single-sign on. Your identity /u/[email protected] IS federated. You don’t need to have a separate login for each instance. You can use that identity to interact with any instance much the same way I am using my federated identity to currently respond to you.
I think you mean /u/[email protected]
Should be @mango_master if all is working correctly, actually ;)
The threadiverse is a bit complicated since there needs to be a way of distinguishing between users and groups, but the
@user@host.orgformat is standardized across the fediverse.It’s funny because using the /u/ format seems to work just fine in the web interface, creating the proper link. Typing it out in the @ format doesn’t automatically create the hyperlink when I type it, but yours works just fine. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Also the /u/ format works when viewed in the Lemmy web interface, but not necessarily inside apps or from other federated services. :)
It also probably doesn’t count as a mention, so the user won’t be notified even if they have that enabled in the settings.
I do not have the same experience. If I want to interact with a different instance then I have to login to that instance. Granted I’m very new to Lemmy but so far the apps are not quite there yet and exploring the fediverse is difficult. Searches are useless unless you know exactly what instance you need to find what you’re looking for.
I understand. It really comes down to your entry point. For example, as long as I’m viewing the community/user/content via my instance I can interact; e.g. I’m replying to a post on https://mylemmy.win/post/114914 ; you, on the other hand are replying to https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/158389/why-can-t-we-have-federated-identity . Since we’re viewing from our own instances we can interact. If either of us goes directly to the canonical URL, https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 , we’d be forced to login. It’s all the same post, just different points of entry that muddy the user experience.
As a new lemmy user this has made a lot of sense! Thanks.
I think what they mean is identity that is coupled to them the person and not whichever instance they choose to sign in on.
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I attended a talk in 2019 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee on Solid, which sort of seems related to what you are getting at. The idea being that you own your data/identity, and can decide to share it with third parties. It goes over things like files, but I believe login identities were also meant to be part of it, I see when I scroll down:
authenticated by a decentralized extension of OpenID Connect
I’ve been wondering recently, especially with Pixelfed adding login with Mastodon recently, if anyone has heard or experienced anything with that project. But considering I haven’t seen it spoken about or implemented since then, I’m not sure I should be hopeful
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This works great for apps. But I want to use the web interface to post a reply to content that’s not on my home instance. I can’t do that easily.
Gotcha. As others have already mentioned it is obtuse. If you end up at the post via your own instance it works but if someone links directly to the canonical post then you get confronted with needing to login. e.g. I see this post as https://mylemmy.win/post/114914, so I can interact just fine whereas if someone sent me the link to https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 (same post, different entry point) I’m stuck.
What interface are you using now? I’m responding to this thread from kbin.social instance usin kbin webclient
If you post a link to this, then I click that link, I am unable to reply directly, since I am on lemmy.world. I would need to first track down the equivalent post in my instance to reply. SSO solves this
Oh I see. Yeah, there could be a feature (a browser addon would work too) that reads the webpage meta data before opening it, and pops a “Open in kbin/lemmy/whatever?” window.
That should just work. You view the post on your own instance and reply there. That reponse trickles to the other instances.
It may take a while to propagate though. The paradigm is close to that of the ancient nntp news groups where responses travel at the speed of the server’s synchronisation. It may be tricky for rapid fire conversation, but works well for comments of articles.
I believe they’re talking about a situation where somebody is like …
Wow, everybody check out this amazing thread! https://someother.instan.ce/post/1194109
Anybody who sees that link and is not already from someother.instan.ce now has to track down that post on their home instance in order to interact with it, which is a bad experience. It’s not the absolute worst thing in the world, like the home URL for the discussion we’re in right now is https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 and if you paste that URL into your local domain’s search it should find you the relevant discussion locally, but it still kinda sucks. In theory this would be sort of solve-able on the server end by having it search for any instance links behind the scenes and re-write other people’s links to point to the equivalent page on your own instance, but right now there’s no “nice” way to handle that situation.
Agreed on your point. We need a way to identify those links so that our browser or app can automatically open them through our own instance.
I am thinking along the lines of a registered resource type, or maybe a central redirect page, hosted by each instance, that knows how to send you to your instance to view the post there.
I am sure it is a problem that can be solved. I would however not be in favour of some kind of central identity management. It is to easy a choke point and will take autonomy away from the instances.
You don’t create a login for each server, you create a single account on a single server and then interact with people and posts on various servers. You don’t login to other servers because it wasn’t designed to work that way, and it isn’t necessary.
Email is a good parallel. I make an email account on ProtonMail, and so that’s where I log in to read and write emails (to other users, potentially on other servers). I can’t use that same username and password to log into GMail, because that’s a different email service provider altogether. You certainly don’t need to make multiple email accounts if you don’t want/need to.
So should we display full usernames by default? What’s going to happen when someone important, IRL, wants to interact with Lemmy?
In a way yes it’s similar to email need to know if your @gmail or @yahoo.
As for “important” people, same noteworthy as any other thing. Only extra they could do is if they are with a company could have a server that is @target @mbl or @meta (though everyone might block the latter xp)
When you put it that way, fediverse is probably better for official companies. I suppose that’s what bluesky was doing with their protocol too
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If your instance shuts down your posts will still be visible on the other servers that your instance was federating with. Which might raise concerns if you want to have them removed, but that’s another issue.
On Mastodon it’s possible to move from one instance to another, taking your followers and the list of people you follow along with you and having the old account point to the new one. In the threadiverse, the most important feature would probably be to not have to manually re-subscribe to a bunch of communities. I think this moving of accounts from one instance to another will probably become standardized at some point in the future, so that you could for example move an account from Mastodon to Lemmy if you should wish. It’s probably pretty far down on the list of priorities though.
In my opinion, the idea of a hierarchy of users as enforced on Reddit through karma is a bit obsolete. I think we’re posting and commenting out of interest in the topic or a willingness to help or entertain. If that’s the motivation, I don’t see how starting over on a different server is such a bad thing; you’re not really losing anything. We’re not here hoarding upvotes like a dragon hoards gold.
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This was thrown around a couple of weeks before the Reddit migration really kicked off, it appears to be excessively difficult to code. And it also doesn’t really fit with the system that Lemmy runs. It’s a great idea, but Ive been lead to believe that it is too difficult to create Although people do feel that account transfer would be a nice feature
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From my understanding, a current goal is to make any account transferable, in case the instance the account is attached to decides to shut down/defederate?
If implemented, we can hope that won’t be tied to an instance shutdown.
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Absolutely.
But no community is created by an individual. I guess that’s where choosing wisely, and trust come into play.
This is why I’m not really on board with the people that advocate for others to seek out and join small instances unless they are older, well established, and active.
well if we can move to another instance and migrate our saved posts, post and comments history, subscribed community easily this might drive adoption because people are used to centralized platform
Because then there would need to be a centralized entity to host all user accounts, and we don’t want centralization 'round here
You could do what Oauth does, allowing many providers to create credentials. That’s what some sites already use to let you login with google/Facebook/etc on their site. Except you theoretically could use any arbitrary sites you trust.
and then when your main instance shuts down you can’t log into any again. So what’s the benefit asides from bypassing defederation? (And this wouldn’t even be a benefit, because instances defederate because they don’t like the users, so if you let people log in with oauth from a hated instance then you’d also get defederated
The problem already exists now, having oauth wouldn’t change anything.
exactly what I was thinking
and on top of that what happens with a proven bad actor
would they be allowed to just jump to a new instance to harrass people?
And all of the “decentralized” options are wrapped in crypto schemes and tax considerations.
So after twenty-something years on social media, along with mailing lists, messageboards, usenet, this is a topic I think about literally every time I have to add, change, migrate, delete my account as I migrated from platform to platform like some virtual vagabond between text-driven city-states. A virtual vagabond with no worldly goods, no name, no history, and completely invisible to all. To exist, I must apply to the City Leader, and if accepted, I get a name, a nice studio apartment, and visibility as well as contact with other humans after watching a short commercial every five or so humans. If I leave, am thrown out, or the city is burned down, I can’t take anything the city gave me with me. By ‘gave’, I mean ‘loaned’ btw; none of those things were actually mine.
All the discussion of whether or not to federate with Threads were interesting in that in general, it’s kind of pointless. A server instance isn’t a democracy; the owner’s opinion is the only one that matters. If you don’t like it, leave. And I don’t argue their right to do so; they’re paying the bills, doing the upgrades, eating grapes with robot butlers, I don’t know their lives. Federated means anyone can run their own not-twitter or not-reddit; go for it. All you need is money, free time, and the knowledge of how to register a domain name, get, run, secure, and maintain servers, and install and configure the program, lure people in, and avoid breaking any national or international laws. Like I said: I really seriously do not argue the owner’s right to decide anything for their server. i know how to do all those things and I ran several websites and archives: I wanted a nap before installation step.
Fediverse is a massive step in loosening the stranglehold megacorporations had on our ability to shitpost in peace and talk about our cats without feeling stalked by people wanting to sell us shit or sell our browsing habits, blood pressure, and underwear size to those who will the try to sell us deeply individualized shit; it’s the circle of life, man.
Wow this got long but feelings.
So at this point–two decades and change of social media, the rise and fall of social empires, so much virtual vagabonding across the virtual desert to find a new city-state…I don’t think it’s too early to consider getting around to a productive discussion of how we go about separating the individual identity from the community and define what is theirs to keep no matter where they are. If there was ever a place and time to start building a model, it’s where all the city states are allies and the individuals can interact with each other no matter what city they’re in. The account transferability in Mastodon is a really good start, but it’s not a solution, much less the solution. It’s a beginning.
I don’t expect to have a working, finished, flawless product in six to eight weeks or six to eight months; I expect it to slide in three weeks and two days after the announcement that it’s ready for alpha testing and immediately break the first time a tester opens it; it’ll be another month before it goes into testing again. I expect it will be a weird buggy mess of wtf after months of virtual warfare and everyone will hate it before the rough draft of the design documents are even released. I expect there will be one weird guy who really thinks everything should be written in Rust because he’s insane and never sleeps. Five to eight devs will dramatically quit; one will quietly move to Utah and farm emus. None of them will be the Rust guy; you’re stuck with him. I expect the working version after testing is done will be hated by everyone and probably kind of crappy. But it will also be amazing, because as of it’s release–no matter how shitty, buggy, or how many inexplicable design choices are made–the individual exists outside of being community property and that no matter where we go or how much we pissed off that admin or if our city-state was nuked from orbit, there are things that are ours and we get to keep them.
I like this comment but in the end this is something most people won’t want, me included, because a decentralized identity would just mean an even better way to track and get yourself doxed for people who want to remain unknown to rulers of city states
Oh God no, that’s not where I want this to go; that pretty much defeats the entire point. This is to expand our options so we can use the plural form of ‘options’ and not the singular and I’m optimistic there will be more.
Your comment was a roller coaster of emotions. I loved it!
I’m a QC analyst and we are fully Agile, so I’m required to attend ever. team. meeting. Discovery, story point estimation, design spikes, any day can be poorly handled emotional regulation day and whoever’s feeling it is making it everyone’s problem when all we want is to finish a few maintenance items and maybe add a comma to some text. Though the testers have nothing to do with this after story point until there actual code migrated to one of the testing environments, we are forced to bear witness to entire dev teams made up of people from three to eight countries, whose only common language is English and as often the only native speaker, I am the only one who can’t mutter not very goddamn quietly in my native tongue that no one else understands; this may have been my motivation at one point to learn Welsh on Duolingo. A Project Manager making three times more than anyone else in the room sometimes swoops in during SCRUM two weeks into our sprint cycle to be perky at us and–on far too many occasions for this to be random–informs us the acceptance criteria had a couple of updates before swooping back out to PM something else’s life. We all hate her quietly until someone who went to check JIRA notes there are double the number of criteria and the user story is not the same in any way;. then everyone but me gets to hate her verbally with no one the wiser. I maintain bitterly grudging silence because everyone in the room speaks English, sometimes better than I do, and they have been in Texas long enough to pickup conversationally hostile Spanish. Our scrum master will either grimly pretend it’s always been this way or very blatantly not care.
At final demo as the tester, I will perform a dramatic rendition of ‘page with comma’ and ‘title:justfication left’ or run batch scripts in terminal while they watch absolutely nothing happening and nod wisely. Half the people in attendance wears suits for a living and have never used a computer; they have secretaries for that. Two worked with my mom and are quietly judging my performance and find me lacking. One stakeholder will ask a thousand questions, five of which have any relation to what we’re doing and I am expected to answer with no discernible change in my performance. Someone is watching TV and can’t be fucked to turn down the volume. Everyone else sits in eerie silence and I might hear a snore. Every one of these people are considered qualified enough to decide if we’re did a good job and sign off on it so we can finally end the sprint and the code can be added to the next release to production. No one feels a sense of relief or satisfaction; at least one dev hasn’t slept since the PM destroyed our lives and may be clinically insane.
Our sprints last four weeks with a prep week in between; we will experience some version of this cycle of dev hell roughly eight times a year and sometimes involving the legislature making their lack of time management all of our problem. Only one sprint will go as planned. One.
The worst part is; despite this, knowing full well what hell is before me, I went back to college for software development of my own free will.
As much as I disagree with him, like a LOT, I do think Nilay from the Verge has a point. It does feel like the “new” internet we have become used to over the years is starting to shift. It feels like people are becoming more and more fed up with social media and want to go back to just hanging out with virtual strangers online. Like, arguing on Twitter with people is all well and good, but it’s also miserable and stressful and it’s been getting worse. Not to mention Elon has no idea what he’s doing. Mark is pivoting away from Boomerbook and Instagram because one isn’t growing and the other is an amalgamation of every other feed based social network, and Reddit is burning down. At this point it was only a matter of time before Corporations set their sight on the Fediverse. Nothing else is working.
The problem with that is that big corporations have no idea why the Fediverse exists and think selling personal data and being free is enough to attract people. Hell, I didn’t even know what the Fediverse was until Reddit immolated itself so I don’t expect your average person to be aware of the inner workings either. That being said it doesn’t take long to realize that the Fediverse is something altogether different once you are a part of it.
There isn’t an algorithm pushing negativity to the top, and each instance is like a person inviting you into their house to stay if you want; as long as you don’t mess up the furniture you are good. At the end of the day you have been allowed in so you should be on your best behavior and follow the rules. You can argue all you want but you are not in control, and if you want control open your own house. Simple as. You can also stroll through the neighborhood if you want as long as a wall hasn’t been built around other houses.
Okay, I apologize for missing something; I don’t disagree with any of that. Did I give the impression I did?
I was only saying that Nilay actually brought up a good point.
The technical challenges are vast, is the long and short of it. But it’s high time there’s a good discussion over how it should (or might) work, at least the kinds of properties such a system should have.
- Self hosting of federated credentials should be possible, but not required
- ‘Backwards tracking’ of federated credentials should only be possible with limited requests (e.g. ‘verify author of post’) and approval of the credential owner
- All data on the credentials instance should be properly encrypted
- All data on credentials instance should be fully and easily portable to other instances via common protocols
There are several issues involved here, beyond just ‘mere’ technology, that need addressing. Personally I think a good start might be to engage with public libraries here. They already keep simple identity records (library cards) and have public service purpose well-aligned with the concepts of the federation and public distribution of information and knowledge.
Because then it wouldn’t be federated, it would be centralised.
I keep thinking we need a way to become our own personal IDPs, then we can have both. But if too many people find the current state of the fediverse confusing we’re never going to get a critical mass of people to manage their own oauth profiles and scopes.
There is a way I know of to have a federated and decentralized identity system, but it involves blockchains and will immediately draw the ire of anyone that hears the forbidden words describing it.
Twister did that, it was a cool concept! One of the few uses of a a blockchain I wasn’t immediately put off by.
Did it still have that awkward immutability aspect to it? Imo that’s always been one of the other major downsides to the tech for wider use cases (the others being the scalability problems that in turn contribute to the energy problems).
Imo identity is way too dynamic to make sense making immutable records of, despite so many real world systems treating it as static.
So, anyone can spin up a Lemmy website. They’re all independent sites, with independent and unaffiliated admins.
In order to sign in to a website with a given set of credentials, that website needs to know something about those credentials. Importantly, they need to know something about your password.
And that’s a security nightmare that no user should be ok with.
Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.
Despite the fact that most of these websites look the same, they’re all completely different websites, and while they can be treated, on first glance, as having the same content, they’re very different places run by very different people. They can’t be treated like a singular entity.
Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.
Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.
SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that’s not really federating identity so much as it’s getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.
I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don’t know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.
@masterspace @mango_master @Kichae
The matter of fact is , just in simple terms for SSO to work, every fediverse implementation has to agree on a standard for federated authentication.
Maybe, I’m just not seeing the issues or don’t really grasp fediverse and it’s implementations yet.My idea, every fediverse instance is unique (no matter the implementation, i.e. mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed,…).
@masterspace @mango_master @Kichae
…
If that’s given, every entity (@‘person, @‘community, …) on each instance is unique.
Therefore, there can never be a duplicate identity = <entity>@<instance.domain>
Which allows the general assumption (all implementations adhere to the standard) each instance (homing instance, where the user is based) can verify the every identity within it’s domain.
…
But do we need some kind of SSO layer with DID verification? All I need to prove my identity anywhere, technically, is my private+public keypair. As long as I hold on to this keypair, distribute it between apps/computers, back it up, I could log in anywhere on a federated platform and use it.
I hope we’re going to see key-based decentralized identity on ActivityPub at some point… Having accounts tied to instances is just not very robust or scalable.
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Or….everybody’s favorite tech buzzword….you go blockchain.
Once someone had a technical problem. “I know,” they said. “I’ll put it on the blockchain.” Now they have a million technical problems.
For identity verification, you can just do a simple key signing, just like how Nostr does it.
Each user will generate a public-private key pair on their own device and has all their posts (and edit/delete requests) signed using their key.
If someone wants to delete or edit their post, the site can just verify that the request is signed with the same key.
There’s still issue of who’s going to store the user’s follows, etc. but I think we can find a way to workaround it.
That then introduces ease of use problems. You won’t be able to log in to another device without copying your key over from an already logged in device for example.
Web browsers don’t usually allow access to local files made outside the browser, so even logging in between browsers would require having your key on hand.
Not to mention if you lose the file containing your key (hard drive craps out, etc), you’ll lose access to your account entirely. So users would be forced to backup their keys.
Not issues that would make the product unusable, but enough of a hindrence that 90% of users would just go find something else (like threads) to use instead.
It’d be great to support identity based on a key hash, so that it’s completely decoupled from any instances. Maybe some time in the future.
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I’ve seen a lot of discussion of account portability, so I think it’s a feature that will be coming, and hopefully soon.
I think this will ultimately be solved by 3rd party clients.
There are tons of mobile apps in the pipeline and some already released. I just got set up with Memmy a couple days ago and it already makes things a bit easier; a step in the right direction.
On desktop I imagine browser plugins helping to tie the experience a bit more together. Hopefully the vanilla UI can also deal with cross-instance behaviour down the road.
The whole point is to be decentralized. You can still interact with communities on other instances, so what’s the point?
I wish there was a way links could auto-resolve to the instance I’m logged in with.
I think people are working on browser extensions to do that, and it would work for users & communities. As far as I can tell posts and comments are numbered by the instance, and don’t correspond between instances, so there is no way to link them in an instance independent way.
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You know you can interact with posts and users on other instances without having to login on their instance, right?
It doesn’t work for everything though. Having a self hosted account that wasn’t tied to any specific platform or instance would ideally allow you to have access to PeerTube and BookWyrm as well as Mastodon and Kbin, without having to worry about your instance shuttering and all of your posts and comments disappearing. I’ve also been really stewing on this idea, I think it’s a probable future state of the Fediverse
