I mean by this, is there any website that with one sign up would allow you to have a matrix account, lemmy account, mastodon account, etc. If it couldn’t be done with just one url it could be made a thing where it would be service.website.tld (so an example would be lemmy.myreallycool.website). Is there anything that already exists like this? I think it would be really cool to just have one home server for everything that you need, and to also have the same identity on all platforms. Another actual practical application of this I can think of is if you want to message someone you know from lemmy but on matrix you could just change the domain (ex: @username@lemmy.myreallycool.website to @username@matrix.myreallycool.website) or something like that. I know that one of the big appeals of the fediverse is that the accounts are interoperable but I still end up using a different account for my mastodon and lemmy accounts for example. I’m genuinely interested in something like this as I think this would be a really cool idea.
You just described (my service, paid hosting) Communick.
Sign up at the main “portal”, choose your plan and your username will be the same on all services that you activate. You get your mastodon account as
@your.username@communick.com, your Matrix id is@yourusername:communick.com, and your Lemmy account is@your.username@communick.news. Authentication is unified - except for Lemmy, which does not provide an easy way for SSO.As pretty as that would be it has its problems. For this to work you need an authentication service. If you use that service for everything then your accounts are linked to this auth provider and you get a problem if that service goes down. You create a single point of failure.
That being said matrix and mastodon support oauth providers. So it is possible to have unified authentication provider for these two. Lemmy doesn’t support this yet.
You can make it just be a private key, where you sign a message with it to log in. The service just needs to know your public key
The problem is not the data. Only the central nature and the dependency on a central point.
You should only need one key to log in everywhere, even if the servers are different
I think at some point the various fediverse components will need to divide up by function, into generic account hosts, generic content hosts, and generic interface hosts. As long as those three functions are bound together, the possibilities for federating between platforms will be limited.
It’s being looked into
I think a true unification defeats the purpose of federation. That said, I have been using Lemmy Handshake to sync my subscriptions between accounts. I generally use one account to login, but sometimes an instance has technical issues or content seems to be missing so I like having a backup option in a pinch.
fedilab is kinda close
“User account federation” seems like a cool feature, but fraught with security hurdles.
Activity pub is spose to be email-like… you wouldn’t want a new email account on every server who has users you want to communicate with via email.
Then, would it be a better idea to create one mega-fediverse app that combines but also separates all the different features of each platform (eg: when viewing it on a browser, it would have a Lemmy tab, matrix tab, mastodon tab, etc) and then have the functionality and format be separate for each one of those instead of trying to pull a “can do everything, good at nothing” type of platform? That would solve the email issue, but I feel it would be more complicated to implement but I’ve also never developed anything remotely like that ever and so I’m not qualified to speak on it.
Honestly, I feel like the answer you’re looking for is a federated single sign on app. The real challenge will be building the right tools and community mindset for determining what a “trusted” instance is.
i agree there is an auto-federated SSO opportunity here, but it be dangerous.
