Mastodon has seen a renewed interest these last few days, but when you look at the statistics mastodon.social siphons the biggest part of the pie, it sees a few thousands new sign-ups a day, while medium sized instance and smaller ones only get a few, sometimes just single digits increase.
This has been exacerbated since mastodon changed its UI both on web and mobile apps, to make the flagship instance the default one for sign-up in an effort to lower the entry barrier, which on the same time is leading to unhealthy concentration, on a platform that advocates for decentralization through federation.
Do you think this is the way forward on the fediverse ?
#mastodon #pixelfed #lemmy #fediverse
When I first considered signing up (I think it was on Mastodon), I was told how very easy it would be to move from one instance to another so it wouldn’t matter where I sign up - so I chose the first server that caught my eye. It was also implied that I’d need exactly one login for the entire Fediverse.
In hindsight, I’m okay with this not being true but it was a disappointment. At least moving servers (while taking your history with you) should be a lot easier if we’re trying to avoid big instances becoming bigger.
“moving servers” means what exactly? Changing your “home” instance? I assume you can still see content from other instances you’re federated with, right? Otherwise what’s the point
You know how people often assume someone is trolling, simply because their account is new?
Another reason would be to not have a billion dead accounts on servers.
One universal login via fediverse sounds like a dream. I would love that.
Very much this. They way it was explained to me was akin to what you are saying, single login, jump servers whenever. In practice it is not that
I’m a shitty developer by all measures but I assume such a feature would be tremendously difficult to implement especially this late in the game. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think so. Like would my username have to be reserved across all instances? Would a new instance have to get some kind of list of known usernames? Where would that even come from? Who knows, not me, that’s for sure
However if it could be done I think that would be a huge selling point. “Imagine if your server started being a shitty place like facebook and you could just move to another without having to nuke your account” is a pretty big deal
Yeah I am thinking about how a implementation for a single acc for the whole fediverse could work.
Maybe a service with just handles authentication of users and gives the result to mastodon, pixelfed etc.
Like the login with google on websites.
Maybe that could be an application for block chain. The ledger has a the usernames and keys that you need to verify with you privat key.
So you log into mastodon with uid and privat key. Mastodon looks into the blockchain ledger and validates from there. If is is valid, you are loged in.
there is a protocol used by HubZilla called zot, it allows for true nomadic identities. where you can even login to your account from any instance.
I don’t think ActivityPub (Protocol that links all mastodon, Pixelfed, lemmy, peertube instances) developpers have any interests in implementing that, or it isn’t so high in their priorities, also to note that ActivityPub developpment has stagnated since its early releases.