Rottcodd

No, it’s not the same.

You’re only describing what would happen at the instance level, and skipping over the fact that the whole thing hinges on your identity on each and every instance actually being one and only one identity that would reside in one particular place. It would actually exist on, and be federated from, one particular server somewhere.

What that means, and the part you’re leaving out, is that whoever controlled that server would control your access to the fediverse as a whole - not just on one particular instance, which is the reality with instance-specific identities, but on all instances of all services.

The only way to avoid putting control over your access to the fediverse as a whole in the hands of one company would be to maintain your server on your own hardware, and as the article itself notes, most people can’t or won’t do that. So most people will end up with their identity on all instances of all services under the control of one specific company. Which is very much NOT the case now.

Now, if someone wants to somehow use their control over my fediverse access for some self-serving purpose - either maliciously or simply as a goad with which to extract profit from me - they’re necessarily limited to one identity on one instance of one service because that’s as high as it goes. They might, for instance, hijack or disable or demand a subscription fee for access to my .world identity, which resides on .world’s server. All that would mean to me though is that that one particular identity on that one particular instance would be compromised. I could still access the fediverse, and even access .world, just by coming in through my kbin identity or my lemm.ee identity or my .ml identity or whatever, since all of those are out of their control.

With this scheme, if someone wants to use their control over my fediverse access for some self-serving purpose, they have one specific place to do it - at the one specific server on which my identity is hosted and from which my identity is federated. With one move, they could hijack or disable or restrict extort payment for my access to ALL instances of ALL services, all at once.

Again, that is very much NOT the case today.

What you seem to be against is forcing you to have only one login. That does go against the model we are talking about.

And it isn’t what’s being suggested.

Yes - that isn’t what’s being suggested. And that’s entirely irrelevant.

The correct way to measure the threat a proposal poses isn’t by what’s specifically being proposed, but by what the proposal, if enacted, carries with it - what it necessitates, implies or even just allows.

As I mentioned before, and this seems to me to be the biggest potential threat vector, unless people host their identities on their own hardware, that information is going to be on someone else’s hardware. And that’s not going to be a charity - it’s going to be a business, that’s going to profit off of it somehow. If this proposal goes through and is relatively widely adopted, there will one day be an industry leader in the identity-hosting business, and that company will have leverage over the fediverse as a whole. And at that point it would be easy enough for them to, for instance, strike a deal with the biggest instances so that the instances, in the name of security or convenience or whatever might suffice, only accept registrations through that particular service.

I’m not saying that that will happen - only that it could. And that’s enough, in my estimation, to make it a bad idea, because if the history of the internet has shown us anything, it’s that if there’s a way for someone to control something and profit off of it, someone will control it and profit off of it, and the original proposal that made that possible doesn’t mean a damned thing.

Nothing about this idea implies centralization.

It’s a single identity that would be used to log in to all relevant sites. How is that not “centralized?”

There is no reason identity has to be tied to the platform using the identity

The reason I prefer that is that then that identity is specific and limited - it’s not me on all sites, but just me on that site. Me on another site is an entirely separate identity.

…and no reason why there needs to be a central identity store.

But with this, there is, for all intents and purposes, a central identity “store.” That’s how it would work - I provide whatever ID is used as a trigger and then the site would access “my” “store.” And presumably that would be an ongoing process, since another of the things that’s being floated is the ability to essentially federate all of my content across instances.

And all of that is going to have to be hosted somewhere, and if I don’t use my own hardware, then it’s going to be hosted on someone else’s hardware, and that means that they - not I - ultimately have control over it. Sure, they can promise that I maintain full control, but that can, as has happened far too many times in the history of the internet, just be a lie.

Granted that that’s the case currently too, again, it’s decentralized. Each individual instance just has control over my identity on that instance - not over my identity fediverse-wide.

In fact, right now my identity IS centralized to lemmy.world and I have no control over that.

Only your lemmy.world identity, which isn’t you.

Is that the part I’m missing? I still don’t understand what the supposed problem is in the first place. Is it that you feel that your lemmy.world identity is in fact “you?” Like that particular online identity is identical to your actual real world self, so not being able to use one and only one identity throughout the fediverse is existentially unsettling?

I’m still trying, and failing, to understand how this is a supposed problem in the first place.

Anyway, only your lemmy.world identity is (by a stretch of the term) “centralized,” and only to lemmy.world, and I guess to whoever it federates with. But that’s not you - that’s just one internet handle, for one site.

And the worst that can happen is that lemmy.world does something shady, in which case you can just create another identity at another site. And that last, as I understand it, was always the central point of decentralization - to make it so that harm that might be done was limited to only the one instance on which it was done, and couldn’t permanently harm the broader fediverse or an individual’s access to it.

Having one central identity though means that any harm done to or through that identity is done throughout the fediverse, and to the affected individual on all instances. That seems like a recipe for trouble, and seems to be directly contrary to the ideal of decentralization.

Your solution to create as many identities as you want is great for avoiding having one identity, but not an example of decentralized identity.

How is it not? My identity on the fediverse is spread around multiple accounts on multiple instances. That’s about as “decentralized” as it gets.

Yes - each identity is tied to a specific instance, so can be said to be “central” to that instance, but again, all that means is that that one instance can potentially cause me harm on that one instance. The rest of my identities are out of their control.

So with this single identity scheme, imagine that it’s somehow compromised or violated or held for ransome or whatever. That affects every single individual account I have throughout the fediverse. While with the way I currently do things, all it could ever do is affect the one account I have on one instance, and dealing with it would be just as easy as avoiding or closing that account. All the rest of my accounts, and my fediverse access broadly, would remain entirely unaffected.

How is that not the better alternative, and much more to the point, more in keeping with the ideal of decentralization?

“If you’re thinking of taking the tribe cross-country, this is the automobile you should be using - the Wagonqueen Family Truckster!”

Just imagine you go to a fediverse site, click “log in with ActivityPod”

It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.

That’s where the whole thing went wrong. When things started getting centralized, the internet started turning into a walled, commodified, ad-infested, bot-generated shithole controlled by a handful of loathsome megacorporations.

That’s exactly the sort of shit I want to get away from, and I rhought that getting away from that sort of shit was the exact point of ActivityPub.

Privacy would also increase because you could control every aspect of you identity

I don’t think that’s true.

I see no possible way that a centralized identity can be more private that an array of separate ones. And rather obviously, with a centralized identity, you don’t control every aspect of it, because it’s an established fact - when you go to a new site and sign up with that identity, it is exactly and only what it’s already been established to be, and it’s immediately tied in with all the others that use the same identity.

On the other hand, when I go to a new site and create a new identity from scratch - one that only exists on that site - I actually do control every aspect of my identity. It’s whatever I make it right there on the spot, and it shares exactly as much or as little detail with my other identities as I want it to.

Granted that I’m very cynical, I just can’t escape the feeling that all of this is cover for the real goal, which is simply to centralize the fediverse, so that a new group of opportunists can squat on top of another piece of the internet and extract rent from ir. We’re being told that this “problem” needs to be “solved” because “solving” it will, so they hope, create the next Google.

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.

This behaviour makes you and by extension mbin seem like a bunch of unhinged petty drama queens.

Personally, there’s already absolutely no way I’m ever going to use mbin, no matter what, just because these people nauseate me.

deleted by creator

Decentralization isn’t an ideal - it’s a fact. It’s the reality of the fediverse.

That was a rhetorical question.

Ah well… I didn’t have much hope that it’d work.

That’s literally the point of the federated decentralization, so people can be allowed to make their own decisions…

This is not quite accurate, and it neatly illustrates the problem.

“Allowed,” in this context, is incoherent. There can be no “allowed” unless there’s some authority empowered to, and mechanisms by which to, allow this or disallow that.

The literal point of decentralization is to move entirely away from institutionalized, hierarchical authority by arranging things so that it can neither be claimed nor exercised in the first place.

And one problem is that people tend to drag their authoritarian habits of thought along with them.

Okay - let’s pretend that everyone on this thread agrees that X is what “we” should do.

Then what?

The entire thread and the entire concept underlying it and all the other threads in which people yammer on and on about what “we” should do plainly miss the most crucial part of the fact that the fediverse is decentralized - it’s not just that you don’t have the power to decide what “we” should do, but that the power to decide what “we” should do does not and can not exist at all.

For fucks sake - which part of “decentralized” do you people not understand?

A probably too long post about an entirely different way of viewing things:

I have accounts at… I guess about eight instances. I didn’t see any reason to pick one, so I just signed up for everything that looked interesting and promising.

I expected to eventually settle on one, but as it turns out, I actually like having multiple accounts. I have four that I rotate between at the moment. Oh, and with the same username on each, though I still haven’t decided if that’s a good idea or not.

First, I have a kbin account and multiple lemmy accounts. Even though lemmy has more users, I much prefer kbin just as far as the software goes - it’s just a better UI. And Ernest is awesome.

Beyond that though, each instance is a different experience, since the federated communities on each one are different, depending on what other instances they’re federated with and which communities from which instances people have subscribed to. And I’ve amplified that by having different sets of subscriptions on different instances.

Kbin.social has a good mix of content but without most of the botfarm instances. I like that. That’s where I do virtually all of my serious posting.

Lemmy.world (when it’s up) has a wide range of content, but too much of it, even not counting the bots, is too shallow IMO. It feels too much like Reddit for my tastes. It is the best one to check in on for the most popular topics though, and it’s where I’m most likely to be subscribed to communities for memes, humor, drama, pictures - all that sort of junk.

Lemmy.one actually feels like what it is - an instance that demands that users behave themselves. It’s nice when I want to just unwind, because it’s already the case that problematic instances are defederated, and I have a limited set of feel good subs there. I almost never post from there though, since I don’t trust myself to behave.

Lemmy.ninja is my favorite. It’s just quirky little instance with terrific admins and an amusing aesthetic. It’s little though - 120 users last I heard. That shows in its all, which is fairly limited, presumably just because few people means few subscriptions so few federated communities. That’s fine though - it’s a selection that matches my interests fairly well. And ninjas are cool.

And I’m still on the lookout for a serious, scholarly sort of instance - somewhere that will be a comfortable home for subs to philosophy communities and the like.

The “All” that’s displayed on a given instance is all of the threads from that instance and from communities on federated instances to which someone from that instance has subscribed.

Roughly:

Imagine a brand new instance. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll imagine that it has no communities of its own, so the only content it can ever have is from other instances.

By default, it’s federated with everyone, but it’s not going to actually get anything from any of those other instances. It’ll just remain that way - federated but empty - until somebody from that instance subscribes to a community on another instance.

At that point, a mirror for that community will be created on the new instance. And from then on, that mirror will… well… mirror the threads and posts on the other instance.

But that’s it. At that point, the new instance has just gone from having no content to having content from one community on one other instance. And it’ll stay that way until someone subscribes to a second community, and then a third, and so on.

So again, “All” isn’t everything on the fediverse. It’s everything for which that specific instance has a mirror, which is everything the users of that instance have subscribed to.

So already to some degree, and undoubtedly more over time, instances are going to come to have a specific feel, as, for example, users on a tech-oriented instance subscribe to every tech community out there and not much of anything else, and so on.

I agree completely.

I recently compared it to sitting in a comfortable little cafe that serves delicious food and looking around and saying, “Gee, I wish this was a McDonalds.”

It just doesn’t even begin to make sense to me.

And I’m with you - gatekeeping or no - anyone who wants Twitter or Reddit or Facebook content can already go to Twitter or Reddit or Facebook to get it, and that’s exactly what they should do.

goes against the whole idea of the Fediverse.

Presuming for the sake of argument that it’s a deliberate move by .ml to freeze out kbin users, it only really goes against the idea of the fediverse in that it’s an underhanded way to accomplish something that was meant to be done openly. By design, every instance is entirely free to choose whether or not to federate with any other.

What a disappointing turn of events. Kbin is now my primary.

And (again presuming for the sake of argument that it’s not simply a glitch), that’s the fediverse working exactly as intended. Just as every instance is free to choose which instances to federate with, every user is free to choose which instances to join or follow.

This whole controversy irritates the fuck out of me, because it’s driven by people who either don’t grasp the nature of the fediverse or are willfully misrepresenting it.

By design, there are no mechanisms by which Meta can be prevented from owning an instance, and there are no mechanisms by which the fediverse as a whole can respond in any particular way. That’s not a bug - it’s a feature.

The exact idea behind the fediverse is that centralized authority is ultimately harmful, and that a social media network can manage without it, through the carrot and stick of federation/defederation.

So anyone who wants to start an instance can (which necessarily includes Meta). That’s not an ideal or a policy - it’s a fact. There’s literally no way for anyone to stop anyone else from starting an instance.

And every instance owner can decide whether or not to federate with any other instance.

And every individual can decide which instance(s) they want to join or follow.

And that’s it. That’s the whole deal, right there.

The whole idea behind the ActivityPub protocol is that those things are sufficient to establish and maintain a healthy ecosystem. And ALL anyone can do at this point is wait and see if that works out to be true or not. There’s literally nothing else anyone can do.

So all of this sturm und drang is just pointless, emotive nonsense. It’s fear and hostility that cannot possibly have any bearing on anything. The system is already in place and events are already unfolding and it’s all going to play out however it does and all of your hand-wringing abd fear-mongering and anger and demands mean NOTHING. They’re just divisive noise.