I’m new to fediverse. For a long time I assumed it would be possible to have a single identity separate from the ActivityPub instance I’m using and tried to figure out what am I missing. Recently, I figured out that it was not the case. People generally have multiple accounts for interacting with different aspects of fediverse. It still bothers me a bit. So I did a search and found this note from 2018 that summarizes my thoughts very well.
I’m wondering if there are others thinking about this, or having multiple accounts has been accepted as the “correct” way of interacting with fediverse?
I think separating identity from the instances would really be a step forward, but as I said, I’m new to this and maybe there are things I don’t understand?
having multiple accounts has been accepted as the “correct” way of interacting with fediverse?
No. You are right that there should be a better separation between your identity and the servers that you use to connect/interact with the fediverse. It just so happens that the existing solutions have been “good enough” for the majority of people, and there are many other issues (content discovery, reputation, server scalability…) that seem to be more pressing than that.
However, there are some other projects which are on the way to make it possible for people to use one server but have their identity separate. Mitra uses Ethereum wallets as a way to login to the server, while Takahe keeps separate domains for the server and the user’s actor ids, which would let you, e.g, sign up with your own id to any server. This would essentially turn ActivityPub servers into a commodified provider, and people could migrate between servers transparently.
I use identity to mean “account” here. Like a Google account that can be use both in Gmail and YouTube.
Yeah, I was endlessly confused that I couldn’t use my social.technics.de account to login anywhere but Mastodon, as I’m pretty sure I had been promised. I suppose I eventually just accepted that I’d misunderstood some aspect of the concept but it did slow down my switch to the Fediverse considerably.
Mhm, you could just add a link to your homepage to your bio which could help associate your various accounts to yourself.
Myself I had used several accounts to access several instances on mastodon, but soon after I realised that I could just follow tags and users across instances anyway, so why keep them alive.
Having several instances of Mastodon is probably not that big of an issue. I would expect one of them to win over time. But it’s not straight forward to use a Mastodon account when interacting with lemmy, PeerTube, PixelFed, etc. If I could get the identity (my handle) from a single place (like some neutral non-profit) and could use it on everything, that would be better. But I guess that’s not happening any time soon.
I’m in the same boat. Would be good to have the ability to have a single identity that works across the fediverse. As a first step if you have your own domain anyway, it’d be cool to alias that to different underlying Mastodon/Kbin/Pixelfed/etc. accounts. It’s possible to some small extend using the “Webfinger” protocol: https://philna.sh/blog/2022/11/23/alias-your-mastodon-username-to-your-own-domain-with-jekyll/
