this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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"Works just like email" is always easy way to explain. Everyone who uses email understands that they can send a message to a @gmail.com account from a @yahoo.com account or any other server.
I recently came across a scenario where the person I was talking 'felt uncomfortable' taking down my email, because it didn't end in .com. I would be careful when making assumptions about the general population.
I've signed up to websites that had entry validation on the email field that flagged not having .com at the end as invalid. Literally someone that should know about technology decided it would be a good idea to make it that way.
That's when you write to the domain's postmaster address to thell them that their shit's messed up.
What do you mean, what's a postmaster?
I would have been happier having never read this. [ [ P A I N ] ]
Ah yeah just like email. All I had to do to comment here from a different instance was:
/post/<id>from the URL and paste it in my instance. Nope 404.Fediverse [email protected] - 792 subscribers?Success!
Just like typing in
[email protected]. 🙄Yeah, these two are major pain points. They are unintuitive, i would argue. If you click "login", it should ask you for your username. If your username is
[email protected], it takes you tobumblebee.comand lets you finish the login process there.The
/post/<id>should have been fixed a while ago. I don't know why it wasn't.I don't think the lack of "federated login" is unintuitive. You wouldn't expect going to gmail.com and logging in with your Yahoo credentials to work, right?
Having a "federated login" service would probably either add a ton of complexity for instance owners, or someone would implement some super naive and insecure centralized solution, leading to a bunch of people's creds getting stolen.
Getting the
post/<id>thing to work across instances would be a pain too, because it would require instances to all coordinate post IDs to ensure collisions don't happen, since far as I can tell, the id in the URL isn't globally unique.The motivation for federated logins would be that often you're linked to a post on another instance, such as https://someinstance.net/post/12345 now when i click on that, in the web browser it opens on the other instance, and now what if i want to comment?
I agree that that specific use case is a pain, but I don't think federated logins are the fix for it. Rather, links to posts on other instances should be automatically translated to a link to the federated version of that post on your home instance, such that you can interact with that post without having to re-log-in. There's a bunch of issues in the Lemmy GitHub project related to this, so hopefully it gets implemented soon.
In my opinion, federating logins kind of defeats one of the main purposes of federation though, which is to give the user control over where their user information lives.
They still have control over their data. If implemented properly, it just changes where there post is created since the post is synced back to their own server to their own account. Regardless of where it was created, it would still be visible on that server since it is a reply to that post.
Federated logins make sense for forums and websites where you have access to content such as PeerTube.
For forums, logging into the forum with your fediverse account would actually be ideal since you can use a forum-style interface to navigate the topics, which would be easier than trying to navigate the same topics on Mastodon. Same thing with PeerTube. You may want to watch videos on PeerTube and comment right on their website without creating a PeerTube account. With federated single sign on, you can post with your existing fediverse account.
We have that on Hubzilla and it is called OpenWebAuth. We can log into other instances and comment directly on their instance as ourselves after logging in.
Well most apps take care of that for you. I'm on a different instance and all I had to do was hit the reply button. For most people setting up the account and choosing server is the hardest part. If I handed someone my phone with an account already made they wouldn't even know they are viewing and commenting on different servers hosted by different people. They would just think its a different looking reddit clone. But I don't agree that logging in if your not on your home instance is hard as it requires you to find the post again. Some apps have an option to pull up the post on a different instance but last I checked that's on an option on the web browser.
The most success I've had is just explaining that it's a social media platform that exists across a variety of websites that all synchronize communities and posts and comments and votes, and you can interact with any of them from any other one
The problem with the email analogy is that, for most people, email exists as the Gmail app on their phone. It does not occur to them how I can send an email from my Hotmail account to their Gmail account. The moment you say the word protocol, 80% of people's eyes glaze over
That’s when I break out the sock puppets and high-pitched voices.
Unfortunately that's not the case. there are many who don't understand what's that after the weird "a"
I blame Twitter for butchering the very well defined URI specification.
People don't actually know that nowadays.