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?

  • rglullisAEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    This is an implementation detail, it’s not required by any part whatsoever of the activitypub protocol.

    All that AP cares about is that actors have an URL for their inboxes and outboxes. You can have even servers to serve your actor id from a different domain in your instances.

    Hell, you can even have no “instance” at all. You can have just a bunch of static files to serve your webfinger queries and bio and even the outbox, regardless of the username that you have.

    I think it’s fine to have people trying to use a simplified mental model to understand new concepts. But it becomes a problem when people start taking these mental models and try to justify their opinions on incomplete abstractions.

    • intensely_human@lemm.eeEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      The vast majority of people who use lemmy have not read the activitypub protocol, and signed up to use lemmy as it exists today

      • rglullisAEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        And web browsers were only meant to be a language for formatting documents, yet software engineers realized it could do a lot more than that.

        It’s not just because someone design things one way that automatically all other use cases become invalid. This argument makes no sense.