Would something single sign on (SSO) even be possible? I think the convenience of having a single account for the family of federated platforms would be wildly convenient.
Of course folks could continue to have individual accounts on each platform if they wanted.
I also understand that it would create a very tempting target for hackers and it would need to use MFA (multi factor authentication).
Just a thought and I would like to see you all have to say.
Asking after having this discussion.
It’s a thought but I don’t think the lack of SSO is preventing broader adoption. I think that the word is just not completely out yet and many of the fediverse platforms are still young yet. I do see organic growth happening though.
Decentralized identity is a field of active research. It’s tough, but very interesting. I’m particularly a fan of what nostr is doing, where accounts are completely separate from relays, and can post anywhere.
Yes I think SSO would be a benefit.
People are generally used to doing one of these:
- “Go to this website and register an account.” This is e.g Reddit.
- “Go to this website, register an account and you can access all these other services too”. This is stuff that Meta, Google etc offer via SSO. SSO is largely invisibile to the end user.
Fediverse at the moment has a lot of “huh, why do different instances have different stuff and why can’t I just access all of that? Oh, I can? But why is it so complicated? Why can’t I just use it from one place?” that is definitely a hindrance to adoption until enough people are there to tell “do it like this” or the system becomes more user friendly and abstracts some of the inconveniences.
As it is, e.g Lemmy can’t even do pagination right, so there’s still a lot of work to be done before it’s a polished experience.
Not sure if this would help or not but what I want is to own my user, so I can bring it anywhere and not worry if an instance goes down since I own the user. Similar to email with your own domain, the provider I use for email could go down but I have control to the domain/email so I can switch to something else, but keep my user.
This would be great. I don’t want to make multiple accounts if I want to leave an instance. It should be as simple as switching in a menu.
