this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
70 points (94.9% liked)

Fediverse

28281 readers
1206 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
TragicNotCute@lemmy.world
Xylinna@lemmy.world
MrCenny@lemmy.world
automodbeta@lemmy.world
woelkchen@lemmy.world
70
Any arguments against separating identity from instance/platform? (single identity across the fediverse) (lemy.lol)
submitted 2 months ago by matcha_addict@lemy.lol to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I am sure it was discussed here before, but I can't find a good way to search this community.

Are there any arguments against having a user's identity federate, and be compatible across platforms?

For example, let us say I sign up with my instance, matcha_addict@lemy.lol

But what if I go on mastodon, and I want to have my own micro blog. Or maybe go to write freely and post some blog posts. I'd have to make a different account on each one.

What if mastodon or write freely could just let me log in with my lemmy account (or lets call it federated account). This has several benefits:

  • users don't have to scratch their head on if I am the same person or not across these platforms
  • theoretically, someone following my feed can get updates on what I do on multiple platforms

Now I understand this would be difficult to implement and iron out all the edge cases, but am I missing anything on why it wouldn't be a desirable feature, given it is implemented?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] MartianSands@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That's going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

There's no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn't attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven't federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that's just not possible

[โ€“] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 4 points 2 months ago

That's fine. I may be matcha_addict@lemy.lol someone else might be matcha_addict@someOtherInstance.com, but I am the only matcha_addict@lemy.lol and anytime someone sees that full ID, they know for a fact it's me. But if they see matcha_addict@mastodon.social, they cannot know for sure.