this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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ethfinance
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One thing a lot of people do not like about the fediverse is that you can only sign in on the instance you signed up on.
If only there was a simple solution, a way to login everywhere and ensure that it's always the same person.
Something public that could identify the person and something private the person could use to prove it's them.
Soo.. Who's going to build 'sign in with Ethereum' (or public/private keys) for the fediverse?
that's not needed as it's not needed to sign in anywhere other than your 'home' instance, except perhaps when it's offline
I agree there's a lot of potential to improve on the fediverse model but I don't think it makes sense to use Ethereum unless absolutely necessary
having to deal with any blockchain is going to alienate a huge part of the target audience though. I agree that there will likely be thriving communities sometime in the future for which a blockchain related identity will be required, but for stuff like kbin / lemmy, I think a more likely solution will be paying an instance for the privilege of having an account there, with the associated privacy nightmare.
Or rather, if I were to run a kbin/lemmy instance, I'd setup a donation portal to a whitelist of charities, and you'd get to register with my instance only after I get proof that you donated to one of those charities. I figure I could get away with storing almost no personally identifiable information that way, while severely restricting new account numbers and dodging any complaints / legal issues since I'm not getting any money. Many people would scoff at such a requirement (just like they would with anything blockchain related) but I could see it work out fine anyway
Sign in with Ethereum (or something like PGP) does not interact with the blockchain. You simply sign a message with your private key.
the thing is though that using private keys hasn't taken off for online logins because it's cumbersome in many cases, and having it tied to a wallet doesn't really improve on that (plus it will scare people of because "blockchain = scam"). That's one area where google and apple et al. are making some progress, with storing credentials in secure storage, once people are used to not entering passwords anymore it'll be much easier to switch to a private key