We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top

One Login: Towards a Single Fediverse Identity on ActivityPub

submited by

Style Pass

2024-04-26 19:30:35

We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.

In a recent post on Nostr, one of many Twitter alternatives that have popped up in the post-Musk era, OG Twitter developer Evan Henshaw-Plath (a.k.a. Rabble) wrote a critique of ActivityPub, the decentralized social network protocol that underpins the fediverse. “You can’t use a single fediverse identity with your profile and followers in Peertube, Mobilizon, WriteFreely, and Pixelfed,” wrote Henshaw-Plath. “You need a totally separate account in each one.”

I love ActivityPub and what apps like Mastodon have built on top of it, but I do agree with Rabble on that point: if you want to fully participate in the fediverse, across multiple apps, you need to have a separate identity for each application. You can’t use your Mastodon ID, for example, to log in to Pixelfed or Lemmy (a photo-sharing app and a forum app respectively).

In a Mastodon post linking to Rabble’s Nostr post — which, by the way, I happened to come across because I follow Rabble on Bluesky, yet another Twitter clone — I suggested that we need a way to carry a single identity across the fediverse.