Some more spitballing from a noob here, but I wonder if much thought has been given to account portability between Lemmy instances, or even Fediverse apps in general.

So far, from what I can see, accounts are pretty much siloed. Two opportunities off the top of my head:

Export your account, including all posts, comments, and user metadata and customization. This actually might be legally required by some jurisdictions, although I'm no lawyer. GDPR might not be applicable for one reason or another but I think the spirit of the law is good.
Single sign on. This is perhaps a little harder to implement, but it might be nice to be able to participate on another fediverse app without having to research instances and sign up. Also nice to try out different instances of the same app before committing to one.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be convenient to have a Fediverse wide login, but it would carry too much baggage in terms of overhead and security. They'd have to carry the whole of the user database across all of the Fediverse, not really feasible. Then there's security concerns over sensitive data like email and passwords. So probably not something that could ever happen.

A sync feature between instances might be do-able. Could be handy. I have a couple instances where I'd like to sync community subscriptions.

[–] njtrafficsignshopper 2 points 1 year ago

There would not be a need to duplicate or sync all user databases across the fediverse to support SSO. In fact SSO already exists in other contexts and I haven't heard of any implementation that works that way. It's essentially accomplished by the authority and the service exchanging login tokens.