Comment on Newish to Fediverse - do I use one account across all services?
bufalo1973@piefed.social 16 hours agoIt would be great if there was a “federated auth service” for all the instances. One account that you could use in each server you like.
gon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Yeah, that’d be cool!
ivanvector@piefed.ca 14 hours ago
This used to come up a lot in meta-fedi talk on Mastodon. The general feeling (from my own observation) is that a central authority for user accounts would defeat one of the big advantages of decentralization: that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it. If all logins have to authenticate to a central service, then if that service is offline then nobody can log in anywhere.
There is capability for federated login in ActivityPub, though, it just doesn’t seem to be very widely adopted. Pixelfed has a “sign in with Mastodon” login option, where you can use your login on a Mastodon instance to authenticate to Pixelfed, and then presumably you can use Pixelfed with your Mastodon account instead of having a separate Pixelfed account. My masto instance doesn’t seem to support it so I don’t know what it looks like.
gon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
Yeah, I’ve heard something like that as well.
Still, having a bunch of accounts is a pain in the ass. Oh well!
i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 12 hours ago
I don’t know if it uses that system, but NeoDB lets you sign in with a Mastodon account too. It’s also fully Mastodon compatible, so you can add it to a client and use it as a basic Mastodon/microblog account if you want. It uses (a modified version of?) Takahē on the backend, a project which sadly appears to have been abandoned.