this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Fediverse

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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Identity in the Fediverse (mattball.io)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the explanation and the links. It's good to hear that there are people working towards this goal.