Any arguments against separating identity from instance/platform? (single identity across the fediverse)

Separating identity from instance was invented in 2011, first implemented in 2012, and it has been stable since 2013. Zot protocol, Red, Red Matrix, nowadays known as Hubzilla. It is called nomadic identity.

Separating identity from platform is a current WIP: Nomadic identity is to be introduced to ActivityPub and then made project-agnostic. The idea is to be able to clone your Lemmy account to Mastodon and Pixelfed and Mobilizon and Hubzilla and Funkwhale all the same. You won't be able to use all features of everywhere everywhere (go ahead, try to edit a Hubzilla wiki or article or webpage on Lemmy, haha), but it'll be the same identity. Still, it would require one account on each server on which you have an instance of your identity.

But what you're talking about is full, unlimited user write access to over tens of thousands of instances of over 100 projects. Like, visiting any one of these tens of thousands of servers and being able to do absolutely everything a locally registered user can do, no exceptions, right away.

Like it or not, but this will require a local account. Even OpenWebAuth doesn't grant you full local user write access, nor does it allow for drive-by, on-the-spot creation of full-blown local user accounts on any instance, regardless of registration of local user accounts is allowed or not. Like, you can't just visit hub.netzgemeinde.eu and, within a split-second, have a local user account with the same login credentials as on lemy.lol and a nomadic clone of matcha_addict@lemy.lol so it's the exact self-same Fediverse identity on Lemmy and Hubzilla.

So it's either this. Immediate drive-by nomadic cloning of your logged-in Fediverse to any instance that you visit for the first time.

Or every Fediverse user must have a user account on every instance of every project out there, and their Fediverse identity must be nomadic everywhere and cloned to everywhere all the same.

Like, you register an account on lemy.lol. Simultaneously, the same account with the self-same credentials will be created on all other Fediverse instances out there. Immediately afterwards, whatever will contain your identity on Lemmy will automatically be cloned to all these other instances of everything. That way, you can immediately use all instances of all projects of the Fediverse just the same.

Or the Fediverse has only one central login server which controls the credentials for all instances of everything out there. You don't register with lemy.lol, you register with this central behemoth. And all tens of thousands of Fediverse instances connect to this central server for login credentials. And, again, your identity with all your data will have to be cloned and mirrored all across the Fediverse.

By the way, I've cloned Hubzilla and (streams) channels before. One channel from one server to one other server. This can take multiple minutes even with not so much content. Guess how long it'll take to clone one identity container from one Lemmy instance to 20,000++ other instances out there.

This is a controversial issue.

Some people don't care about having an unique identity and actually favor creating multiple accounts on each service, to present themselves with different avatars depending on who they are interacting with. They are not "attached" to their identities and see this an opportunity to stay pseudonymous online and protect their "real" identity.

Some people think that the instance you join should be also somewhat indicative of your tribe and that they should be able to filter out who they talk about by checking the domain. This view is especially favored by the Mastodon crowd.

And then some other people (I think I would include myself) would like to be able to not just "use" a single identity, but to have portable identity in the Fediverse as a way to ensure that we can remain sovereign over our online presence. I would personally love for Communick customers to be able to use their personal domain, because that would mean that if even if I closed down things tomorrow, they would be able to migrate easily and without depending on me.

We host instances for trans and gender diverse folk, to provide a space that explicitly puts their safety first.

Take away the idea of an instance as a community/identity/distinct space, and the goal for these places existing is gone. Instead of a community and a safe space, we become a generic bit of hardware that enables transphobes as much as trans folk.

That's not something I'd be keen to keep sinking my own funds in to to support.

What I'd much rather see is instance based accounts, however, with the ability to take over/migrate them from other instances, so that if an instance goes down, people can still keep their identity. It would also allow instances focused on protecting minority communities to keep doing that.

It is a matter of responsibility. If you can log into any lemmy instance or mastodon server with the same account, then which server takes responsibility for your actions in the fediverse?

I have seen instances be defederate from because of their lax account creation requirements, or because of harrasment from users from a specific instance.

If an account can log into any instance, then who is responsible for banning the account?

It will be difficult to implement and pretty much at the end of the list for the software you want to implement.

Users most of the time dont want to get identified ( some are here because of the privacy ) and if you want to get identified you can just use PGP signing.

It would be ideal If the big activitypub platform stacks like mastodon, Lemmy, etc could agree on some standard like a federated OIDC or DID approach for all authx/authn functions. then fediverse users could get cross-platform and even cross-instance logins “for free”

@matcha_addict There are very few drawbacks (assuming it's implemented in a way that doesn't break things). That's why it's part of two of the big three social protocols (Nostr & AT/BlueSky) and Activity Pub might get it soon.

I've written about and participated in discussions about implementing identities not controlled at the instance level and discussed bridges that connect activity pub to other protocols. The one major drawback people tend to bring up is moderation, but moderation is not effected like some people think it could be. Just like a PGP key doesn't force Gmail to host a user's email and a domain doesn't force Dreamhost to host a blog, even if identities are separated from instances an individual instance can still ban a user from participating in that instance or prevent other instances from interacting with your instance. The only difference is that if an instance goes down or bans a user the user can pick up and move to a different instance instead of having their account nuked. As somebody who lost a profile due to a SQL database breaking it would have been really nice to have been able to continue.

Also, in the thread here I heard a few people talking about it negating communities. We already can communicate with remote servers, I'm not fully sure where the argument that independent-from-instance-identities will break communities comes from. If something like nomadic identities are implemented, which again, they may be, your account will still be largely focused on one instance.

Say you're an arborist and join an arborist Mastodon community. You're still a part of the community, and your account is centralized there until you say otherwise. Yes, you can reply to a lemmy post or peertube post by authenticating on one of those instances, but you can already do that (there's just a lot of jank since Activity Pub's monolithic servers often have a hard time understanding each other). Yes, say you reply to a lemmy post about beekeeping that would show up in the local insatance timeline (assuming remotely authenticated posts are allowed to show up in the timeline), but again not only can you already do that, but it's not like you'd expect an aborist focused instance would have ONLY aborist focused discussions.

Lol, I hope I was coherent. I just misinterpreted a bottle of bottle of lime infused liquor as 30 proof instead of 30% ethanol so I consumed a little more than I expected. Anyway, regardless, personally consider identities separated from servers/instances a very big pro, with very little drawbacks (if implemented in a way that does not break existing implementations).

Why does it actually matter? If you're that important, you should have your own domain and instance

AFAIK, the only practical thing in the way of having a separate server that just hosts identity accounts for all types of fediverse content (while the content itself is hosted on other servers) is that your host server is responsible for presenting the interface through which you view the rest of the fediverse, and the interfaces are specialized for a particular content type. You could have a server running a variety of fediverse software (mastodon, lemmy, etc.) which automatically generates similar accounts for each user on each service, so users could sign up once and then switch interfaces; but I think the rest of the fediverse would still treat them as separate identities.

I don't understand the benefits.

users don’t have to scratch their head on if I am the same person or not across these platforms

They already don't need to worry about that. Presumably if you could log in with your Lemmy user on Mastodon, your user domain would still refer to your Lemmy instance, just as it does currently. That's besides the fact that I have no idea how this mechanism of logging into different sites would even work.

theoretically, someone following my feed can get updates on what I do on multiple platforms

They can already do that with the current mechanism. It's only a problem with Lemmy not supporting various other forms of social media concepts that prevents you from writing, say, a toot (microblog).

It sounds like what you want is just a more generic ActivityPub instance that supports more forms of social constructs.

Aside from all that, there's what other people have mentioned. Grouping users on instances has all kinds of moderation benefits.

IMO, if you choose a common username (except for alt accounts) for all your platforms (in my case, dch82) it's fairly easy to find all the accounts. If you want to, you can also link your other platforms in the bio.

AFAIK you can already sign into pixelfed with your mastodon account. It is a good idea, I think the only problem would be you would be completely reliant on Instance and if that goes down everything is gone

I don't see any technical limitations preventing that. And I think it's a desirable feature. Imagine a world where you don't have to come up with lots of passwords and sign up on dozens of websites, but instead have one identity that's saved in your device and you can access any free software service without signing up and it'll already tell you if your friends are there. It could interconnect content and features...

It's a bit difficult to get it right, though. The identities need to be secure and reliable. Servers can't vanish (or data needs to be distributed) or people will lose everything at once. We need pseudonymous handles, sock puppets and access control. And there is a lot of trust involved. We need to mitigate for spam and trolls...

And agree on one standard that gets everything right for any arbitrary use-case.

I would think that it’s naturally an opt-in feature and therefore essentially fine with only a practical upside.

So if every users would spin up their own instance or "email server" like "me@matcha_addict.com", could that actually work? Or would that break the activity pub protocol with too many instances?

Yeah sadly

Your last sentence is unclear, is that actually implemented?

I am trying the approach of just making multiple affiliated services, and forcing people to have consistent account names across each. See https://bestiver.se

My potential argument against it starts with asking where the credentials are stored for authenticating this identity.

Currently the home instance stores the hashed password and performs authentication.

In a way, the identity “belongs to” the place that does authentication, which now happens to be the instance.

If identity is decoupled from an instance, that means authentication decouples from an instance.

If the identity “belongs to” the fediverse as a whole, then that means the fediverse as a whole has an authentication mechanism.

Unless we can come up with a distributed authentication mechanism, that means the fediverse as a whole has some authentication service, as in one, which means centralized.

This therefore breaks decentralization, unless the authentication is somehow handled in a distributed way. Maybe consensus or something on a hashed password? But if those hashed passwords are stored in a distributed manner, then you’d need a super long password to prevent rainbow table attacks on the passwords, given the hashed values would essentially be public information.

Maybe public keys are stored in a blockchain? I don’t know this is beyond me in the details.

But to summarize the problem at a data model level, an identity belongs to an instance, because the instance can authenticate them. If the identity now belongs to the whole fediverse, then the whole fediverse needs to be able to authenticate them, which if not handled correctly could lead to centralized authentication, centralized banning, censorship, reddit, etc.