The Fediverse Passport would be the central account for all users on the Fediverse.
How it would work
a. Upon signing up for the a platform on the Fediverse the user would be redirected to the “Create your Passport” You would create your unique username. Once signed up you would then have an account on every platform connected to the Fediverse.
b. If someone friends/follows you on one platform they would automatically follow you on all platforms. Insuring that communities and friends could stay connected across platforms.
c. The passport for the user would show your feed on all platforms and allow you to selected which platform you want to see your feed from, also allowing you to directly search your content so you could find a post for whatever reason you need.
d. For the subscriber it would show them your feed and allow them to easily find your content.
e. Tons of customization options including the ability to monetize and or set a subscription fee for the video, blogging, and other “arts” platforms.
Safe Guards
You would be allowed to set your privacy setting to, Public, Subscribers Only, Approve Subscribers, Mutual Friends only, Private (Requires link)
Benefit
Would allow stream less interaction across the whole Fediverse and really get it going. No more having to create a different account on each platform and now you can claim an identity and keep track of your communities, also each site would directly help “advertise” the others.
Decentralization is a feature - not a bug.
A passport in the way described here doesn’t need to be centralised. Your profile could link to your other profiles through metadata, rather than a centralised system.
And further - the establishment of a single, fediverse-wide account for each user would make it far too easy for those so inclined to silence anyone they wanted merely by banning their one and only account.
It could have several even as many as 100 different people with part of the key to access the center point for the passports so that any decisions would have to be unanimous and would keep things purely being monitored for technological updates.
Centralization under 100 people is still centralization.
The key to the fediverse is that there is NO central authority. Not a purportedly limited or constrained or distributed one but none at all, in any way, shape or form.
And we want to keep it that way.
It’s not a matter of how ones profile would be accessed, but how it would be created in the first place snd how it would be managed.
Necessarily, those who implement the creation of accounts have control over how they’re created, who is allowed to create them and how they will be handled after creation.
Any scheme to establish one “central” (your own term) account for the entire fediverse will necessarily be managed by one “central” service, which means one “central” authority over account creation and management
I’m not the OP.
And no, a central account doesn’t require a central service, it just requires amendments to the protocols to allow for a decentralised identity. Nostr, bluesky, etc all work that way. Nostr is full of nazis and bitcoin bros, and bluesky is effectively centralised in other ways, but both of them do have a genuinely decentralised single identity system.
There are a few ways of doing it. A single account on the first platform, and then signing up to remote platforms with that account. A system of trust that allows a user to verify that other remote accounts are genuinely also them. Combine it with platforms that recognise content posted from other accounts/platforms that belong to the same person, and let them edit the “remote” content locally and federate it out again etc.
So you don’t end up with a centralised identity, but rather, the ability to manage your identity from whichever instance you happen to be signed in to as if it were created locally on that instance.
Ah… yes. You’re not the OP. You’re the one pushing a platform with built in subscription gatekeeping and a raft of reputational anti-features.
Figures.
I don’t use bluesky or nostr for the very reasons I outlined in my comment, and I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone. Especially nostr, which is a shit hole.
My point is though, they both do non centralised ID, giving similar benefits to what the OP is suggesting, without the centralisation they’re suggesting
This isn’t centralization, it’s duplication.
You can’t have a full round robin of duplication. In order to have duplicates, you have to have one central original, of which all the rest are duplicates.
And that’s exactly the sort of thing the fediverse is intended to avoid.
Every instance is federated but ultimately separate. The accounts on those separate instances are necessarily also separate. There is no possible scheme by which those necessarily separate accounts can be consolidated that does not involve, at some point, some central authority to implement it and/or manage it.
And that’s exactly the sort of thing the fediverse is intended to avoid.
It’s not. Your passport account would be portable, just like any other account. I really don’t see what the problem is.
Unless what you are describing involves some type of Decentralized Identifier, let’s please stay away from any solution that depends on a single point of failure.
What Fediverse could use was some kind of equivalent of Linktree. “Here’s my personal accounts on Fediverse. Here’s some related to my projects. Here’s some other random links.”
Because currently I’m like “maybe check out my Mastodon profile, it has links” - it works, kinda, but I’m not sure it’s the best solution. For example, you could include support for this in the fedi software, so once you specify where your link page is, it’d pull the links and show them on your profile.
…I know, this would be too beautiful for this world and it’d get run over by spammers. But for glorious few days we’d have sensible Fediverse profiles! Think about it!
Maybe add the links in your bio?
I think it’ll be cool for lemmy communities as well to create an aggregate of multiple communities
IIRC they are already working on this
There is also KeyOxide with solves part of it via cryptographic verification and I believe some fediverse platforms already support it: https://codeberg.org/keyoxide
It’s like everyone forgot about open ID but also having accounts tied to the an instance is not the problem with good export and import. Communities are what we need to have abstraction on just like IRC if I go to @games i should see threads from all instances on the network. Just like everyone in an IRC network can talk in the same channel even though they connect on different IRC servers.
Piefed has multicommunities and agregated comment views
https://piefed.zip/post/100161
All comments from 5 crossposts in a single view
A few options
- https://piefed.social/ - flagship instance
- https://piefed.zip/ - lemmy.zip team
- https://piefed.ca/ - lemmy.ca team
- https://feddit.online/
Nope. No thank you.
I’m not against this being an optional feature.
But since I’m a bit strict privacy wise I wouldn’t use it myself.
as with email, your instance is part of your unique username
In theory the fediverse is not a monolith. We actually want for this to not work.
I like the concept, but personally I see the decentralised nature of the Fediverse as a benefit rather than a hindrance, and moving all identity functionality to a centralised system would create more problems than it solves.
Suddenly you’ll have a single point of failure for the entire Fediverse. A very appetising target for hackers and DDOS attacks.
An alternative that’s in the spirit of your idea would be to allow for auth delegation, i.e. if you sign in with an Activitypub ID rather than a plain username, redirect to that instance to sign in then redirect back to the instance you started from, auth token in hand.
The nice thing about this approach is it’s basically just OAuth 2. It’s familiar, simple to implement and built in to a lot of web frameworks already. The only extra step would be advertising the server’s auth URL via the nodeinfo endpoint, which is fairly trivial to do.
I am not quite sure how this works - where is my “passport” created? On a centralized platform? What if I want to have different accounts on different instances?
Ideally on a platform similar to Gmail in its decentralized nature but connected to the fediverse and accessable through the main fediverse website as well.
We could allow for duplicate username with a unique 10 digit code identifier allowing you to adjust your privacy settings for each platform.
Ideally on a platform similar to Gmail in its decentralized nature
Really? This is the key to understanding that you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
Who would manage this platform?
What would their business model be?
I like where your head’s at, but Mastodon’s system of verification seems much easier to me and doesn’t rely on a third party.
