Mike Macgirvin, the long-time developer that brought us Friendica, Hubzilla, Streams, and the Zot protocol, is bringing his most powerful concept to the rest of the Fediverse: Nomadic Identity.
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IMO, this seems exactly what the fediverse needs to thrive. The whole “choose a server” thing is a big disincentive to adoption by most people.
That’s not exactly what nomadic identity is about, although it can also help with that.
The way nomadic identity is implemented in Hubzilla for example is that you can have accounts on multiple servers and by importing a shared cryptographic identity into all of them, other servers know to treat them as a single entity. Once that is established you can log into your account on any of the linked servers and use it normally. But if a server goes down or you decide to delete your account on one, you can seamlessly continue to use everything from another linked server.
Super cool, the worry of an instance dying will make people avoid smaller instances and pick the big stable ones. Having this safety net should help balance things out.
I wonder if this could work with threadiverse communities. We’ve seen communities disappear when an instance goes down. Could the communities also be saved like this?
I don’t see why not. And in fact, they would benefit from the whole relay thing, allowing multiple accounts on different instances to be the “same” community
That could be an improvement over following 3 or 4 identically named communities on different instances
It wouldn’t change that, unless the moderators of those communities agreed to merge them by using the same cryptographic identity.
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Personally I like that there are different communities with different characters, but the option for community moderators to opt into such a nomadic arrangement would certainly not hurt. At least it is much better than if 3rd parties like clients or alternative implementations like Piedfed smash them together with currently no way for communities to opt out of that.
Yes, it should definitely be optional
This article was the first time I understood that particular way of implementing nomadic identity, and it’s the first time I’ve felt genuinely excited by the idea.
My concern is that with “instanceless” nomadic identity on the fediverse is that ultimately, it would mean that instance would lose their sense of differentiation and community, and would simply be infrastructure instead, and that’s how we we end up with bluesky.
This implementation though is amazing. It lets people actively lean in to community based instances, without having to only pick one, and it gives people protection against loss of any particular instance.
Indeed I am also slightly weary of too easy account migration. Not only do instances lose character because of it, but also are much more likely to be shut down or abandoned if it can be justified with easy account migration. The instance I am currently on for example would probably not exist anymore had not the previous admin felt the need to hand it over to someone else.
But in the bigger picture I think Hubzilla’s nomadic identity is a good compromise of balancing out these different considerations.
Super disagree. A community at the protocol level can have just as much character as a community at the network level, but without most of the drawbacks. The “instance as community” idea was always a poor substitute for actual
Groups. The community shouldn’t be a server that users are bound to; it should be aGroupthat has access controls and private memberships (if desired). The moderators get all the same benefits of maintaining a limited community with their own rules, but users aren’t beholden to petty drama via instance blocks or defederation.That’s one way to look at it, sure. But it fails to account for community dynamics. The fediverse is largely run by volunteers and funded by that small percentage of users that feel strongly committed to their particular instance. If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.
This is also why I doubt Bluesky federation will be ever anything but a novelty for some self-hosters.
If you break that up you end up with only a few large and likely advertisement funded instances being able to survive.
I’m not saying I don’t think instances should be able to use that model, only that I think that model should not be the dominant way of building a community on the fediverse. But I don’t see why a user would be less attached to a community just because its hosted on a different server from them, especially on the threadiverse which is topic based and where users are most likely going to engage in multiple topics.
I think another way to look at it is that accounts are tightly coupled to instances, to the point of being a detriment. I’ve personally lost all of my data and had to start over from scratch 5 or 6 times due to servers suddenly going down over the years.
Groups are one way to abstract community functions up a level, and what’s crazy is that Group Actors themselves could also have a similar thing. People have talked about merged cross-instance communities on Lemmy; this would be one way of enabling that.
That makes total sense. Still, it removes the pressure of choosing a server, since migration and use of several servers becomes seamless. As it is right now, there’s the resilience and future lifespan of an instance to consider, plus fragmentation of your identify as defined not by your username but by your actual “online persona” constructed from your posts, etc. (unless you’re really going for alts, of course). You can create other identities on other instances but they are separate, you “lose” your posts, etc. if something happens. if I understood correctly, that becomes less of an issue with nomadic identity?
Yes as long as you remember to link up your account to one on another instance before it goes down ;)
This is the one feature I always missed from back when I hosted a Hubzilla instance. YES PLEASE!
Yeah. While I could take or leave Hubzilla’s UI, this concept in particular was mind-blowing. The fact that it’s like, 8 or 9 years old at this point, and the rest of the Fediverse barely supports it, is crazy to me.
Channel relay and data migration seem like huge UX wins if they were to be added to all ActivityPub sites - huge pushback against any arguments to even entertain BlueSky and Threads.
Thank you for this Sean! It is nice read, that nomadic identity is still being worked on.
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Does this mean if I block a neoliberal nazi on mastodon it will block them everywhere else too? Awesome.
OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.
The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.
Will this be impacted by browsers killing third-party cookies?
This is scary. So my hashed password gets sent to other instances?
No.
Can you maybe update the article with a link that describes how this solution isn’t a security concern? Its knida the elephant in the article
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This was a longstanding fediverse complaint, which was quite remarkable to me. It was described as a “missing” feature even though you never had this ability anywhere else let alone the fediverse.
If you get a new email address, it doesn’t bring your contacts or your history of emails with you. If you make a new twitter account, same thing. And of course, don’t even think about trying to port, say, your facebook stuff into a youtube account. But if the fediverse can’t, then it’s a dealbreaker.
If you truly want to channel the limitless depths of human creativity, give a Comment Section Skeptic ™ every fediverse feature they say they want. Then wait and watch as that creativity goes into action, as [insert new feature] is now the new dealbreaker. It is and always will be an endless game of whack a mole.
