Zot’s identity layer is unique. It provides invisible single sign-on across all sites in the grid.
It also provides nomadic identity, so that your communications with friends, family, and or anyone else you’re communicating with won’t be affected by the loss of your primary communication node - either temporarily or permanently.
The important bits of your identity and relationships can be backed up to a thumb drive, or your laptop, and may appear at any node in the grid at any time - with all your friends and preferences intact.
Crucially, these nomadic instances are kept in sync so any instance can take over if another one is compromised or damaged. This protects you against not only major system failure, but also temporary site overloads and governmental manipulation or censorship.
Nomadic identity, single sign-on, and Hubzilla’s decentralisation of hubs, we believe, introduce a high degree of degree of resiliency and persistence in internet communications, that are sorely needed amidst global trends towards corporate centralization, as well as mass and indiscriminate government surveillance and censorship.
As you browse the grid, viewing channels and their unique content, you are seamlessly authenticated as you go, even across completely different server hubs. No passwords to enter. Nothing to type. You’re just greeted by name on every new site you visit.
How does Zot do that? We call it magic-auth, because Hubzilla hides the details of the complexities that go into single sign-on logins, and nomadic identities, from the experience of browsing on the grid. This is one of the design goals of Hubzilla: to increase privacy, and freedom on the web, while reducing the complexity and tedium brought by the need to enter new passwords and login names for every different sight that someone might visit online. You login only once on your home hub (or any nomadic backup hub you have chosen). This allows you to access any authenticated services provided anywhere in the grid - such as shopping, blogs, forums, and access to private information. Your password isn’t stored on a thousand different sites; it is stored on servers that you control or that you have chosen to trust.
You cannot be silenced. You cannot be removed from the grid unless you yourself choose to exit it.
That’s the whole point of Fediverse that there is no centralized player who will validate your data. Or every instance owner knows your password.
Hence, “Zot”: