I recently re-tried NOSTR (I technically have an old account I rarely ever use), specifically on Primal and the Fountain Podcasts app, and I really enjoyed how simple it was: just sign in, and BAM—you’re in.
No fuss, no extra steps.
It got me wondering—why doesn’t the Fediverse work like that? I know that using special login codes might be too complex for most people, but why not allow usernames and passwords instead?
Imagine a single sign-in for the entire Fediverse. You wouldn’t need to worry about instances, and onboarding could be much simpler.
Has this idea been considered, or is there a technical reason why it wouldn’t work?
In short it’s hard to do right.
It would have to be in a way that doesn’t chain you to one central identification server that could ban everyone, but also still handles moderation actions properly.
People would probably also want their identity to be portable (movable to other source instances) which will mean different things to different fediverse services in terms of what would move, and things like handling username collisions. We can’t even lift and shift between instances of the same service yet, whete it should be a simple one to one.
Most of all, a huge part of the conceptual point of the fediverse is that you should be able to interact with the rest of it from any point inside it (with exceptions for intentional defederation between some servers). On a conceptual level, you shouldn’t need to create a login for mastodon when you can post to mastodon from lemmy, and vice versa. You create your login on the type of fediverse system you want the interface of, on a server instance you agree with the moderation policies of, and then you interact with whatever you want from there.
In practice it’s not so simple, but that’s largely seen by the various devs as a software interoperability thing, not a sort of single sign on identity thing.