Would something single sign on (SSO) even be possible? I think the convenience of having a single account for the family of federated platforms would be wildly convenient.
Of course folks could continue to have individual accounts on each platform if they wanted.
I also understand that it would create a very tempting target for hackers and it would need to use MFA (multi factor authentication).
Just a thought and I would like to see you all have to say.
Asking after having this discussion.
It’s a thought but I don’t think the lack of SSO is preventing broader adoption. I think that the word is just not completely out yet and many of the fediverse platforms are still young yet. I do see organic growth happening though.
Not sure if this would help or not but what I want is to own my user, so I can bring it anywhere and not worry if an instance goes down since I own the user. Similar to email with your own domain, the provider I use for email could go down but I have control to the domain/email so I can switch to something else, but keep my user.
This would be great. I don’t want to make multiple accounts if I want to leave an instance. It should be as simple as switching in a menu.
Honestly I think one of the bigger hurdles is the confusion about where to sign up. You have to choose an instance, preferably one that is “compatible” with you. But it hardly matters to the user because it’s all federated anyway. Just give me a server that will stay up.
But it hardly matters to the user because it’s all federated anyway
Unless you unknowingly joined a community that was defederated by everyone else.
Yeah, I had joined Beehaw shortly before they defederated. I knew this happened, but I thought “meh, it’ll be alright”. I tried to make the best of it… but at the end of two weeks I was asking myself “Is this all there is to the fediverse? It’s pretty disappointing”.
So before I gave up on Lemmy and the fediverse, I looked for a new Lemmy server that wasn’t defederating nor defederated from the fediverse. Eventually, I settled on Lemm.ee and I see know just how much of the fediverse was being filtered out for me.
disclaimer: I don’t fault Beehaw for their decision to defederate. It is their choice to make, and I greatly admire and respect their transparency in the matter. However, for myself, I don’t need, want or appreciate these extra guard rails “to keep me safe”. I’m an adult and are willing to act and be treated like one.
You’ve raised another important thing I’ve never thought of: How do we even know how connected an instance is to other instances aside from hearing from other users. I didn’t even know Beehaw was defederated until you mentioned it.
Defederated from what though? I still see plenty of other community’s posts.
It’s not just two, it’s two “big” ones and a bunch of eg. neo-Nazi ones, Lemmygrad, spammers and so on. I vaguely remember there being some sort of blocklist that a lot of the instances use, but don’t quote me on that.
Lemmy’s vanilla UI has the list of connected and blocked instances under
/instances, so eg. https://beehaw.org/instances
