User identity and Activitypub

[phi@activitypub.space]

Greetings to the Activitypub.space community. I have a question. Is it possible to use Activitypub protocol to define a unique identity on a single account across the various federated platforms, valid for the entire Fediverse?

[julian@activitypub.space]

phi yes! It is very much possible in theory, but in practice it is less of a given.

What you're thinking of is having the "various fediverse platforms" — Mastodon, Pixelfed, WordPress, etc. — allow you to use your existing fediverse account, and for your interactions there to be done by that account, which might not be on the server you're on.

A lot of sites (this one included, for now) doesn't support that, but the base techniques are there.

We know we can achieve fediverse single sign-in through OAuth2, and the ActivityPub API can theoretically accomplish the latter. It's a matter of support, and it's something I want to focus on soon!

[julian@activitypub.space]

In practice, evan worked on a proof of concept implementation with the geotagging API.

Last I heard he had a proof of concept working, but not sure if he tested it against mariusor@metalhead.club's implementation.

cc evan@cosocial.ca

[phi@activitypub.space]

julian Thanks. I think there's some confusion among the protocols for defining a single identity for the Fediverse. I've heard about the Nomad, Zot, and Streams protocols for defining a nomadic identity on Activitypub, but I'm a bit confused.

[julian@activitypub.space]

phi in that case nomadic identity a la silverpill@mitra.social would be closer.

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@phi Initially nomadic identity was only possible in Zot and Nomad protocols, but not in ActivityPub. But we figured out how to do it in ActivityPub too.
Streams is a software that implements both Nomad and ActivityPub protocols, and supports nomadic identity. There are other projects too:

https://codeberg.org/ap-next/ap-next/src/branch/main/nomadpub.md

@julian

[phi@activitypub.space]

silverpill@mitra.social I think it's important to define a feature within ActivityPub that "allows users to freely move from one server to another without losing their identities and content." Obviously, the servers don't have to be part of the same platform.

[evan@activitypub.space]

phi maybe this is a social layer problem rather than a technical problem.

Your issue means a lot in a world where we have amateur hobbyists setting up social network servers and allowing the general public to join. Those hobbyists get overwhelmed or bored after a while, or they do a bad job and your server gets defederated.

In this case, it makes a lot of sense to move from one server to another. But this is not the only way we could organize the Fediverse.

Email isn't like that. You (probably?) don't use an email address from a server you found on a list on joinemail.org. You probably, instead, have an email address from your employer or university, and maybe a personal one from a well-known and reliable cloud service. If you're very clever, you may use your own domain for email, and share it with your household or family.

In those cases, you rarely change email addresses. We have some ad hoc ways to move from one to the other, but they aren't built into the SMTP or IMAP specs. And yet we have a lot of email going around, even after 50 years.

I think we should be putting our efforts into getting Fediverse services from organizations we have a lot of affinity with, like employers or universities or the city you live in or the post office.

Another option is using the extremely portable identity system we already have -- domain names. It should be a lot easier to bring your own domain name to a Fediverse server, and to move your data between servers by backing up and restoring and then repointing your domain name to the new server, like you do for blogs. This is really hard right now.

I think LOLA is doing a good job with online moves, but we should also be encouraging more server developers to support BYOD, and we should encourage Fediverse users to get a domain.

[phi@activitypub.space]

evan Yes, the domain name can be an excellent solution. However I am looking for a solution where a federated platform, e.g. Mastodon, can recognize an account from another federated platform such as NodeBB or Friendica and vice versa. At the moment if I want to reply to a mastodon user, Mastodon asks me what my mastodon account is. If I give it my NodeBB or Friendica account, Mastodon rejects it. I think that the ActivityPub protocol should solve this problem.

[julian@activitypub.space]

phi it does, in a way! There's such a thing as the ActivityPub API, which when combined with an authentication layer would enable just such behaviour.

So far there aren't too many implementors making it happen, but it is still under development

[trwnh@mastodon.social]

@evan @phi

> We have some ad hoc ways to move from one to the other, but they aren't built into the SMTP or IMAP specs

yes they are, though? in IMAP, you can just copy your messages and folders from one inbox to another. in SMTP, we have email forwarding.

using your own DNS name can make things easier, but the main challenge in fedi is that we don't have a common storage/access abstraction (equivalent to IMAP folders), and we don't recognize HTTP redirects (equivalent to SMTP forwarding).