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.

  • Rottcodd
    5•7 months ago

    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.

    • @kernelleEnglish
      7•7 months ago

      You’re going to love SolidPods, honestly. From the website:

      Solid is a specification that lets individuals and groups store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. Pods are like secure web servers for data. When data is stored in a Pod, its owners control which people and applications can access it.

      I see no possible way that a centralized identity can be more private that an array of separate ones.

      Check out the specifications as well, using Pods you could have seperate accounts on every platform linked only by the ability to login using your Pod.

      • Rottcodd
        1•7 months ago

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