I (like many people) have been paying more and more attention to distributed social networks over the past several weeks. For the uninitiated, these networks (hereafter referred to as “the Fediverse”) are individual instances running software which communicate with each other over standard protocols (mostly ActivityPub). A user on one instance can follow and interact with users on other instances in a mostly-transparent way, somewhat similarly to e-mail. The general philosophy, I think, seems sound: by decentralizing things, you reduce the influence — and potential damage — of any one entity.

I’m new to fediverse. For a long time I assumed it would be possible to have a single identity separate from the ActivityPub instance I’m using and tried to figure out what am I missing. Recently, I figured out that it was not the case. People generally have multiple accounts for interacting with different aspects of fediverse. It still bothers me a bit. So I did a search and found this note from 2018 that summarizes my thoughts very well.

I’m wondering if there are others thinking about this, or having multiple accounts has been accepted as the “correct” way of interacting with fediverse?

I think separating identity from the instances would really be a step forward, but as I said, I’m new to this and maybe there are things I don’t understand?

  • canpolatOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I don’t think what you say contradicts with what I said. If we separate “identity providers” from “content hosts” a person could easily go get as many accounts as they like (just like getting many gmail accounts) and then use them to log in to any content networks they are interested in. I didn’t suggest that everyone should have their own instances of anything.