Why can’t we have federated identity to login into fediverse instead of creating login for each instance?

  • toasteranimation@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is a reasonable question. What if you put a lot of effort into posting and commenting just for your instance to shut down or disappear? With a ‘federated’ identity, you would theoretically still have your user account if just one instance went dark, even if it’s where you created your account

    • nLuLukna @sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      This was thrown around a couple of weeks before the Reddit migration really kicked off, it appears to be excessively difficult to code. And it also doesn’t really fit with the system that Lemmy runs. It’s a great idea, but Ive been lead to believe that it is too difficult to create Although people do feel that account transfer would be a nice feature

      • toasteranimation@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        that makes sense. I just foresee a lot of people losing accounts abruptly because of instance volatility. It would be nice to have some kind of backup option

    • sab@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      If your instance shuts down your posts will still be visible on the other servers that your instance was federating with. Which might raise concerns if you want to have them removed, but that’s another issue.

      On Mastodon it’s possible to move from one instance to another, taking your followers and the list of people you follow along with you and having the old account point to the new one. In the threadiverse, the most important feature would probably be to not have to manually re-subscribe to a bunch of communities. I think this moving of accounts from one instance to another will probably become standardized at some point in the future, so that you could for example move an account from Mastodon to Lemmy if you should wish. It’s probably pretty far down on the list of priorities though.

      In my opinion, the idea of a hierarchy of users as enforced on Reddit through karma is a bit obsolete. I think we’re posting and commenting out of interest in the topic or a willingness to help or entertain. If that’s the motivation, I don’t see how starting over on a different server is such a bad thing; you’re not really losing anything. We’re not here hoarding upvotes like a dragon hoards gold.

    • mockingben@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      From my understanding, a current goal is to make any account transferable, in case the instance the account is attached to decides to shut down/defederate?

      If implemented, we can hope that won’t be tied to an instance shutdown.

      • toasteranimation@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That will work except for any communities you’ve created. Those couldn’t be ported to another instance because so many have the same names. Posts, comments, subscriptions and saved posts are all simple to transfer, but if you are a mod, there is a potential problem getting too cozy at any one instance. You could lose your work and earned reputation

        • mockingben@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Absolutely.

          But no community is created by an individual. I guess that’s where choosing wisely, and trust come into play.

    • dingus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is why I’m not really on board with the people that advocate for others to seek out and join small instances unless they are older well established, and active.

    • DingDongBell@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      well if we can move to another instance and migrate our saved posts, post and comments history, subscribed community easily this might drive adoption because people are used to centralized platform