Would something single sign on (SSO) even be possible? I think the convenience of having a single account for the family of federated platforms would be wildly convenient.
Of course folks could continue to have individual accounts on each platform if they wanted.
I also understand that it would create a very tempting target for hackers and it would need to use MFA (multi factor authentication).
Just a thought and I would like to see you all have to say.
Asking after having this discussion.
Decentralized identity is a field of active research. It’s tough, but very interesting. I’m particularly a fan of what nostr is doing, where accounts are completely separate from relays, and can post anywhere.
Not sure if this would help or not but what I want is to own my user, so I can bring it anywhere and not worry if an instance goes down since I own the user. Similar to email with your own domain, the provider I use for email could go down but I have control to the domain/email so I can switch to something else, but keep my user.
This would be great. I don’t want to make multiple accounts if I want to leave an instance. It should be as simple as switching in a menu.
I had a drunk conversation about this very thing last weekend with my brother. We thought about doing it as a crypto coin or NFT or some block chain thing. We got about as far as you expect 2 drunk people talking about something that they have a passing familiarity with but little actual technical knowledge of.
Someone much smarter than me might figure it out one day.
Yeah I’m not going to pretend like I know the technology but I hope it’s possible.
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Yeah I thought about that but it seems a little bit excessive for just what I want.
With mastodon, you can switch your user between instances and bring your followers and stuff with you. I guess the only problem would be is if the server you are leaving suddenly went offline, but I’m on a pretty decent server so I’m not too worried about it.
I don’t think this is in Lemmy, but I imagine it will be at some point.
This could be something that could be incorporated into the development of this process. I would love that too.
If I suddenly didn’t like the way an instance is doing their administration I could move easily.
Yes, this would be nice. You can use .well-known redirects so that when someone searches your owned name they get redirected to a Fediverse account of your choosing. And you can update those redirects if you change accounts. But that’s not quite the same.
It’s a thought but I don’t think the lack of SSO is preventing broader adoption. I think that the word is just not completely out yet and many of the fediverse platforms are still young yet. I do see organic growth happening though.
Honestly I think one of the bigger hurdles is the confusion about where to sign up. You have to choose an instance, preferably one that is “compatible” with you. But it hardly matters to the user because it’s all federated anyway. Just give me a server that will stay up.
But it hardly matters to the user because it’s all federated anyway
Unless you unknowingly joined a community that was defederated by everyone else.
Yeah, I had joined Beehaw shortly before they defederated. I knew this happened, but I thought “meh, it’ll be alright”. I tried to make the best of it… but at the end of two weeks I was asking myself “Is this all there is to the fediverse? It’s pretty disappointing”.
So before I gave up on Lemmy and the fediverse, I looked for a new Lemmy server that wasn’t defederating nor defederated from the fediverse. Eventually, I settled on Lemm.ee and I see know just how much of the fediverse was being filtered out for me.
disclaimer: I don’t fault Beehaw for their decision to defederate. It is their choice to make, and I greatly admire and respect their transparency in the matter. However, for myself, I don’t need, want or appreciate these extra guard rails “to keep me safe”. I’m an adult and are willing to act and be treated like one.
You’ve raised another important thing I’ve never thought of: How do we even know how connected an instance is to other instances aside from hearing from other users. I didn’t even know Beehaw was defederated until you mentioned it.
Defederated from what though? I still see plenty of other community’s posts.
It’s not just two, it’s two “big” ones and a bunch of eg. neo-Nazi ones, Lemmygrad, spammers and so on. I vaguely remember there being some sort of blocklist that a lot of the instances use, but don’t quote me on that.
Lemmy’s vanilla UI has the list of connected and blocked instances under
/instances, so eg. https://beehaw.org/instances
Beehaw is only defederated from two instances iirc, so most of us are still able to see and interact with them.
This is why a single sign on that gives you access to ALL THE THINGS and would simply adoption.
Looks like this may already be starting https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/686097
Doesn’t SSO undo the decentralised nature of the Fediverse? What would it even add? You can already access a lot of different ActivityPub platforms from one (e.g. Lemmy can access kbin, Mastodon can access both) and that will only increase as development on these platforms increases.
Not really. The content of what is in the fediverse is still distributed and not owned or living in a single instance.
It would add the ability to simply your username/instance/password administration.
It would also allow an account to have an ability to create a community because if I find someone on Lemmy that has similar interests as I do it’s likely I would enjoy their content on other platforms.
Right now people have to post all of their social media in their profile and then I have to go log into those platforms and go find them to follow them.
If I found someone that I want to connect with on multiple platforms it be would be great if I could choose them through a “Follow Me Across The Fediverse” option where I could pick what platforms I follow them on.
I think it could add a lot to the sense of community.
An Sso account would mean one identity across all instances, which can be tracked and monitored.
Users using different account on different instances with different passwords are a lot more difficult to track.
Googles entire operation is about connecting users across different websites using identifiers and so on, because that’s where the value is. All that data under one profile is highly valuable to them.
It’s always like this by the way - users give up privacy for convenience or “safety”.
Later, you add ads when it’s too convenient to move away from the service.
You could still make separate identities if you choose. At present you’re still using a single one to interact across the fediverse (unless, of course, you make another one in the same way), so no additional loss of privacy
But it would still require there to be some centralised account provider though, right?
I think that optimistically as the Fediverse is developed you won’t need to have different accounts (unless you want to) as an account on one platform will be able to interact with another platform in exactly the same way as one created on that platform would.
No, any server instance could support sso as long as they agree on the protocol. If the one you’re using now turned it on tomorrow you’d be able to use it elsewhere.
Yes, particularly if SSO compatible with other social media platforms.
Ideally, you could even upload GDPR data requests from servers and build up some of your post history in some way.
I think a lot of people would switch to something like Mastodon if transferring service with one service provider to another for hosting their content and connecting them to their old network was made much easier.
That’s almost the kind of thing the new FTC chair (who has publicly stated an agenda to reevaluate tech company anticompetitive behaviors) might want to end up looking into.
Fixing social media - and with it quite a lot else - may end up being as simple as classifying social media companies as common carriers of personal media content and connection data, who had to play nice with others.
If they needed to bring down their walled gardens and play fair in allowing users to take business and content elsewhere, the one thing capitalism is actually good at would so quickly change them all into platforms competing against each other for your business and data rather than only succeeding by effectively holding you hostage to their data retention.
More than any single federated platform, the idea of standardization of social media data - and its adoption even by Meta of everyone out there - may be setting up some very promising future developments.
Reddit threw oil on this fire at quite the worst timing for their long-term longevity.
This guy Federates
Nope, people always ask for it but I don’t believe they would use it a lot.
I think most people don’t know what SSO is, so it wouldn’t help them adopt this other technology they also know nothing about. I’d love it though!
I do think so and I know you can use ldap and ohers for PeerTube but I haven’t seen it for lemmy or Mastodon yet.
I’m thinking something like ORCID (used in research and the academe) can be implemented.
Yes I think SSO would be a benefit.
People are generally used to doing one of these:
- “Go to this website and register an account.” This is e.g Reddit.
- “Go to this website, register an account and you can access all these other services too”. This is stuff that Meta, Google etc offer via SSO. SSO is largely invisibile to the end user.
Fediverse at the moment has a lot of “huh, why do different instances have different stuff and why can’t I just access all of that? Oh, I can? But why is it so complicated? Why can’t I just use it from one place?” that is definitely a hindrance to adoption until enough people are there to tell “do it like this” or the system becomes more user friendly and abstracts some of the inconveniences.
As it is, e.g Lemmy can’t even do pagination right, so there’s still a lot of work to be done before it’s a polished experience.
I’m happy to have separate logins. Even if I could have 1 login, I’d still keep them isolated.
