this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Fediverse

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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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Identity in the Fediverse (mattball.io)
submitted 1 year ago by canpolat@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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?

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[โ€“] Bruce@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Nothing prevents someone from following you on your instance. Knowing the sum of your interests gives me more information than the sum.

So, to avoid having your profile being made and exploited, you could split account by interests.

As an example: Someone interested in videogaming and driving Ferraris has a lemmy account he uses to posts on both subjects. Some mar*keting bot wil report "This guy certainly has a high budget for his videogames. Let's sell him expensive racing games with exclusive Ferrari logos & goodies". If that person had one account for video games and another one for ferraris, he'd be protected from that.

But yes, everybody should feel free to use a single wide use account.

[โ€“] canpolat@programming.dev 2 points 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.