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.

  • Panda (he/him)English
    21•8 months ago

    No, thank you. I prefer having 25 different Fediverse accounts despite them all being able to communicate with each other and 10 Mastodon alts because I didn’t like my instance.

    • @XeroxchasechaseEnglish
      2•8 months ago

      But you could still have it. For me it’s really discouraging to have a different profile for each service on each server