why can't we have federated identity ?

mango_master@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 229 points –

Why can’t we have federated identity to login into fediverse instead of creating login for each instance?

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This works great for apps. But I want to use the web interface to post a reply to content that’s not on my home instance. I can’t do that easily.

Gotcha. As others have already mentioned it is obtuse. If you end up at the post via your own instance it works but if someone links directly to the canonical post then you get confronted with needing to login. e.g. I see this post as https://mylemmy.win/post/114914, so I can interact just fine whereas if someone sent me the link to https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 (same post, different entry point) I'm stuck.

That should just work. You view the post on your own instance and reply there. That reponse trickles to the other instances.

It may take a while to propagate though. The paradigm is close to that of the ancient nntp news groups where responses travel at the speed of the server's synchronisation. It may be tricky for rapid fire conversation, but works well for comments of articles.

I believe they're talking about a situation where somebody is like ...

Wow, everybody check out this amazing thread! https://someother.instan.ce/post/1194109

Anybody who sees that link and is not already from someother.instan.ce now has to track down that post on their home instance in order to interact with it, which is a bad experience. It's not the absolute worst thing in the world, like the home URL for the discussion we're in right now is https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 and if you paste that URL into your local domain's search it should find you the relevant discussion locally, but it still kinda sucks. In theory this would be sort of solve-able on the server end by having it search for any instance links behind the scenes and re-write other people's links to point to the equivalent page on your own instance, but right now there's no "nice" way to handle that situation.

Agreed on your point. We need a way to identify those links so that our browser or app can automatically open them through our own instance.

I am thinking along the lines of a registered resource type, or maybe a central redirect page, hosted by each instance, that knows how to send you to your instance to view the post there.

I am sure it is a problem that can be solved. I would however not be in favour of some kind of central identity management. It is to easy a choke point and will take autonomy away from the instances.

What interface are you using now? I'm responding to this thread from kbin.social instance usin kbin webclient

If you post a link to this, then I click that link, I am unable to reply directly, since I am on lemmy.world. I would need to first track down the equivalent post in my instance to reply. SSO solves this

Oh I see. Yeah, there could be a feature (a browser addon would work too) that reads the webpage meta data before opening it, and pops a "Open in kbin/lemmy/whatever?" window.