On fediverse apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed and (soon) Threads, content is federated — but identity isn’t. We look at potential solutions.

In response to Bray’s toot, Evan Prodromou — one of the creators of ActivityPub, who is currently writing an O’Reilly book about the protocol — noted that this “is also the argument for using the ActivityPub API.” He described the API as “an open, extensible API that can handle any kind of activity type — not just short text.”

This gets to the nub of the issue. The fact that I can’t use my Mastodon identity to, for example, sign up to Pixelfed is not actually an ActivityPub issue — it’s because the two applications, Mastodon and Pixelfed, each require you to create an account on their respective products. What Prodromou is suggesting is that, technically, you can use the ActivityPub API for account access.

  • Pieresqi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Wow, can’t wait to get banned in 1 instance and that ban cascading to federated fediverses(?) (through fediverse ??) and getting banned everywhere.

    • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I think power users might reject it just as we shy away from “login with Google.”

      Love it for normies though. Reducing barriers here is huge.

    • warmaster@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      How about?:

      Fediverse > Fedigalaxy > Fediplanet > Fedicountry

      ActivityPub > Platform > Instance > Community

  • flamingos-cant@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    “ActivityPub’s API is how client applications interact with the data on a user’s main account server. It lets the user read data on the same or other servers, and it lets them create activities and other kinds of objects on that server that get shared (under the user’s control) with the rest of the world.”

    I can’t see how Apub’s C2S API can realistically be implemented. It’s fairly light on details and if I’m understanding it correctly the only standard way to get activity from the server is to pull from an actor’s inbox, which has to be an OrderedCollection of all the activity the actor has received (likes, notifications, posts, the lot). This shifts a lot of the work to clients which, apart from being being very classist, is very limiting for implementations.

  • Rottcodd@kbin.social
    1·
    2 months ago

    Serious question - why is this considered a problem? I don’t get it.

    It doesn’t seem to be for convenience, since you’d still have to sign up for and sign in to different sites separately (which is obviously unavoidable - the alternative would be centralization, which is exactly what we’re trying to get away from).

    Is it an ego thing? So that people can conveniently establish a sort of identity brand in the fediverse? Is it all about accomodating would-be influencers?

    Or is it some sort of psychological thing? Like people just feel uncomfortable with separate identities spread around the fediverse? Like they’re somehow disjointed and fragile?

    I can’t make sense of it. I have easily a dozen accounts spread around the fediverse, mostly but not all under the same name, and I have no issue with that. I don’t see a problem that needs to be solved. To the contrary, if anything, I’m wary of the idea of consolidating them - that just feels too much like moving back to centralization, just by a different scheme.

    I just don’t get it.