I’m genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)
My point is: if you have a ledger that the user controls and can use to redirect to different auth endpoints, then you don’t need oauth. You just use the record in the ledger as the authentication mechanism directly.
Yeah exactly. But instead of having to implement that auth process in every different fediverse service in however many different languages u simply write it once with an oidc endpoint and all fediverse services can run it as a container in their stack. It makes implementing such auth system a simple config change and updating a docker compose to add a new service.
It looks like we are talking past one-another.
What I am trying to say is that “getting the user to complete a login” is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.
So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That’s good, but it doesn’t solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.
Ahh I see what ur saying now. Yeah the actor id is hard as it needs to be an actual dereferenceable uri as actors need an inbox and outbox of activities.
I don’t think u can maintain cross instance actor ids. The only issue I see with having multiple actor ids for the same user is that they will have their content and profile split across multiple instances.
I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?
Yes, that would be ATProto’s did:plc system.
Ahh I see I’ve never looked into how atproto works might need to look into it and sees if some of its systems can be adapted for Activpub. Thx for the info
If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I’ve done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the “ledger” mechanism.
U got a github in of or me to take a look? I’ll defiantly look into it sounds interesting.
Specific to the DID, I haven’t published yet. But what I am doing is based on my Typescript SDK for ActivityPub, so you can follow that repo for updates.