this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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It's great that they're going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don't miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse's "anyone can post there" system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, "one login to access everything" systems.
Federated logins are a thing! The challenge is finding one that's open and privacy-friendly. Unfortunately the widest-used ones come from entities like Google or Facebook with a marked interest in preying on user data. Mozilla used to maintain a federated system (Persona) but they discontinued it. I know Ubuntu offers one for all their services (bug trackers, forums etc.) but not sure if it's open to third party systems. Perhaps there are others worth using.
Alternatively, you can aggregate all your logins in one place across devices and browsers. Firefox Accounts are a very simple method of doing this (presuming you use Firefox everywhere), and you can choose to only sync logins rather than bookmarks, plugins etc. And of course there are other dedicated password managers, with or without online sync, open or closed source, self-hosted or private hosted etc.
Since I'm now using a password manager I've been having less issue with creating as many accounts as needed.
But I do agree it'd be great to have a single sign on.
If you are looking for a little bit of "extra" to go with your password manager, check out firefox relay. You can create emails that forward to your real email without exposing it. They allow you to block emails entirely, or just promotions. Their paid option is like $12/year (USD) and allows unlimited masks, and allowing you to create your own relay subdomain (like (whatever I decide)@dusty.mozmail.com). It's definitely worth the relatively tiny charge for the paid version.
There is also a relay service with Cloudflare but I've not tried it out yet. But having an email like 0tK8h384jkcxas@mozmail.com saved to my password manager is no big deal.
Yeah, I use anonaddy
I've not heard of that before, I'll have to check it out. Cheers
But then you have the same centralization issue - and it's even worse, if the central authority has a fit for some reason about you, now you're locked out of many completely unrelated sites.
You mean the password manager as the central authority? You can self host a password manager using, eg, Vaultwarden.
Even if you use a trusted, paid commercial service, I think the risk of that happening is lower than on Reddit. Their business model is simpler and more transparent. They want to keep you as a customer so you will keep paying them. And there is less opportunity for them to ban you for political reasons when you're not expressing yourself on their platform.