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?
Because implementing that shit is hard.
Nostr definitely has some interesting/good implementation details, and on a spectrum of ease of censoring users, Bluesky is on one end, Fedi is in the middle, and Nostr (if it gets big enough) is on the other end.
But also with Nostr, I really hope you backed up those account keys, because if you didn’t and you lose your device, your access to that account is gone forever.
Every way of decentralizing a social media system has advantages and disadvantages.
I do wish cross-posting between fediverse types (microblogs, link aggregators, image sharing) was as easy as cross-posting within them.
I know it’s technically feasible to comment on a Lemmy post from your mastodon account (at least, that’s what I was told), but it’s not easy or intuitive.
Admins usually don’t want to allow direct registrations without email validation as it makes it too easy for spammers
Even aside from the whole “we should centralize the fediverse” thing, there’s something I’ve never really understood about threads like this
Imagine a single sign-in for the entire Fediverse. You wouldn’t need to worry about instances, and onboarding could be much simpler.
I don’t see where that would make any notable difference.
I currently have three different accounts that I use regularly and two more that I use off and on, and I just happened on another instance that looked interesting, so set up an account there day before yesterday, and will certainly do the same somewhere else in the not very distant future. That’s what I’ve done the whole time I’ve been here - I start accounts, sometimes I use them and sometimes I don’t, sometimes the instance shuts down, whatever. I just keep juggling some number of accounts, and always have. So I should be a prime use case for this sort of thing.
And I just can’t see the value at all.
I can get to any of the accounts I currently use regularly with a single click, since they’re all pinned to my home page. And I can get to any of the others with two clicks, since they’re bookmarked. In the event that I get logged out of any of them (which pretty much never happens), I can log back in in about five seconds. And that’s it - that’s the full extent of the labor I have to put in
But every time someone trots out this centralized identity idea, it’s presented as if it’s some sort of wonderful labor-saving thing - as if it will save us all from the horrifically onerous drudgery of having to log in to separate accounts And I just don’t see it. It’s already almost entirely effortless.
??
Nostr offers this (completely portable identity) without centralizing anything, that’s the selling point. Similar to cryptocurrency, your Nostr account is tied to a key. If you possess that key, you can connect to any Nostr node (assuming you meet their criteria - some require payment, some might have banned you, etc) and post to your account. This makes individual Nostr servers wayyyyy less important than servers are on fedi, and cuts fedi style inter-instance drama off at the knees, because servers are really just conduits for posts to flow. Yes they can differentiate themselves on e.g. uptime or performance or spam filtering, but at the end of the day they are just a conduit, not a community like fedi servers can be and often are.
Right now on fedi it’s a pain in the ass to move accounts to a different server, if the one you are on supports it at all. Identity is only poorly portable at best. Mastodon only kinda sorta supports it in a janky way and there are plenty of bugs. Whereas on Nostr, which servers carry your posts doesn’t even matter nearly as much as it does on fedi, where it matters a lot. It doesn’t matter 0% on Nostr, but the importance is vastly de-emphasized.
It’s just different approaches, with different advantages and disadvantages. Censorship resistance from the perspective of the user is a much more emphasized goal in Nostr’s design.
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.
Idk about nostr, but yes, the decentralized nature of the fediverse makes this very hard/impossible. Who has the authority on what’s your login? What if I don’t want a user to login on my instance because they’re a known spammer? Etc
Nostr is a lot smaller than fedi so these questions are still being answered there, and they do have their own problems with spam. Since users are identified by keys and can theoretically pop up and start posting on any node, it makes some questions of handling spam and abuse potentially function a lot differently than they are on fedi. If you were gonna do a shared blocklist it would need to be a shared blocklist of keys, etc. As for the emergent properties of that and how it affects the character of the network… probably just gotta keep watching how it plays out.
