Pretty much in the title. Maybe you wouldn’t even use it, but would like to simply see it exist for the sake of having a federated alternative.
For me, it’d be the following:
- Meetup
- Tiktok
I am on the first two, but would prefer a federated alternative. I’m not on Tiktok, but would like to see a federated alternative.
I’ll admit these might not be a good idea. But as a thought experiment, I’d be curious about the community weigh in on what you all think this might look like.
That’s not technically possible.
You could have one instance offer more than one platform, though, and you can already use multiple frontends with whatever instance you’re on. Kbin, which you’re on, actually tries to do the Swiss army knife thing IIRC.
It’s entirely technically possible. Apps already use third party identity providers all the time, you just need federated apps to support OAuth both for signing in on the client and as a backend identity provider, and standardize how federated apps return user info that would be common to any federated app (usernames, saved / liked posts, subscribed feeds, stuff common to the ActivityPub spec).
You could use the same credentials to open a new account on another instance, sure, I guess. You still have to create another user on the new platform with their own ActivityPub inbox and so on.
I guess to a non-technical user that might seem like the same thing, but then again so would your home instance allowing you to view other platforms. The second one would be way cleaner and easier on instance maintainers.
Uhh, let’s see…
After a search, it seems like they actually just copy the settings from your Mastodon account. It’s still a separate account. I’ll keep checking in case I missed something.
It doesn’t even sound like they securely bring over the password, which presents a little bit of a phishing threat if people are re-entering their Mastodon password into third party apps like this one.
Edit: Yup, here’s a video/gif. I’d do a federated link but I’m not sure Lemmy supports that yet.
You could totally copy someone else’s Mastodon this way, so that’s fun.
It would still be a separate account, but yes, seamless migration to a new instance could be a thing. There’s scripts for it already. OPs suggestion that you can just move between instances with the same account isn’t how the fediverse works.
If you just want to been on Pixelfed and Mastodon, your instance giving access to both would be the cleanest, best way.
Ah, sorry. Didn’t notice, there’s a few people talking to me.
Yes, it’s not a thing that could work. If you had some centralised way to handle accounts it wouldn’t be federated anymore. It would be another (semi-)walled garden or some kind of blockchain-ish thing, but either way it wouldn’t be ActivityPub-complient.
What does that mean? When you post, who’s server’s outbox do you post from? Inboxes and outboxes by server are a central part of the standard.
You can copy over a user, and make another similar account (like pixelfed), or you can do stuff on that server from another federated server, but at the end of the day you’re not on the same account on different servers.
Unless you changed activitypub, right?
Sure. It’d be a pretty huge departure, though. To a weird degree, like Coca-Cola leaving the beverage business becoming a tire company.
If you wanted to make a new protocol, you could go beyond federation and have a fully decentralised system where everything happens on arbitrarily many servers in parallel, but that would be a lot of work and probably data-heavy before any users walk through the door.
