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2025-01-26 17:22:14

chartier@toot.cafe

Hey #Mastodon and #Fediverse folks: Is there any way to use a single account for all these different services?

I know the main #PixelFed instance has a ‘sign in with Mastodon’ option but you still need to create an account with a unique user ID. Seems like just a login convenience thing instead of a centralized ID system.

Is that in the works at all?

2025-01-26 17:24:40

Jarulf

jarulf@mstdn.social

@chartier I'm sure people who actually know what they are talking about will reply, but I don't think so.
It his, however, a topic that keeps popping up.

2025-01-26 17:31:54

Thor A. Hopland

hopland@snabelen.no

@chartier what you've experienced is basically OAUTH, which is used to confirm identity through a user account.

There is a thing called "nomadic user account" which if I'm not mistaken is a feature of #HubZilla. But that is about moving accounts to and from services.

Weirdly enough #FUTO has polycentric user accounts, which tries to tie together several user accounts as one without being reliant upon any given platform. Maybe this could be a solution.

But tbh It's not an easy problem to solve

2025-01-26 17:58:44

Robert Kingett

WeirdWriter@caneandable.social

@chartier No. This is why everyone follows from their one account, like this is why a lot of people follow Friendica etc from Mastodon.

2025-01-27 08:48:11

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@David Chartier What Pixelfed does is for show. It's a smoke screen. "Sign in with Mastodon" actually means "create a local user account on this Pixelfed instance with your Mastodon login credentials, but your Pixelfed account will be fully independent from your Mastodon account". But Pixelfed calls it "Sign in with Mastodon" to a) make things easier for people who don't know anything about the Fediverse and b) have an edge over other Fediverse projects.

But this is very misleading to those who have never really understood how the Fediverse works and how servers work. Their expectation is to one day have one user account on one instance of one project which works like a user account on 30,000+ instances of 150+ projects.

Being able to log into a Mastodon instance, then go to a PeerTube instance, upload a video, go to a Hubzilla hub, upload 20 images to "your" cloud file storage and embed these images and the PeerTube video into a post with over 50,000 characters. Without registering a PeerTube or Hubzilla account.

But this will never come. Never. This is technologically absolutely impossible. Not to mention how dangerous it is.

This would require two things.

One, single sign-on all over the whole Fediverse that recognises your login on other instances. There is a single sign-on system for the Fediverse named OpenWebAuth. But it's only available on Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, and it's half-available on Friendica. Mastodon has rejected OpenWebAuth.

Two, one user account on each of the 30,000+ Fediverse instances to be registered immediately, including private, single-user instances. You can't use a Fediverse instance like you had a local user account there without a local user account.

This would mean that every Fediverse instance would have to have one account for every Fediverse user. If I spin up a personal (streams) instance on a machine at home, it would immediately, upon first start-up, create well over 10,000,000 user accounts. Because what do I know who wants to come over from Mastodon to my (streams) instance out of all Fediverse instance to start long-form blogging or to have their own cloud server?

Even OpenWebAuth doesn't give you full user power on other instances. It just tells others that you're you, and it gives you some permissions. For example, if you're on (streams), and you're a member of a private Hubzilla group, and you visit the channel page of that Hubzilla group while logged in on (streams), then the Hubzilla hub recognises you and shows you the posts and threads. Those who aren't members and logged in see nothing. That's because only members are permitted to see what's going on in the group.

CC: @Jarulf @Thor A. Hopland

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Pixelfed #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenWebAuth #SingleSignOn