Fediverse

I think you're spot on with account thing. When I first came to the fediverse, I thought the distributed system was cool, but then I saw the interoperability between different software and though ok, but why would I want to?

If someone posts a peertube video within the medium of lemmy, I also want to discuss it within the medium of lemmy, after all, there's a reason they posted it here. I want to do it in this community, using this identity. If I wanted to comment on peertube, I would go to peertube.

So the only benefit I saw was that you could use one account for all my social media, as convenience. But of course, that's not how it works. The interoperability is just a half baked sending messages thing. Because they are fundamentally different platforms not carefully designed to work perfectly with every other platform in the fediverse. There's no central account, you sign up for a specific software, on someone's instance.

Agreed 100% on the account proliferation and type asymmetry points. The way things stand, right now, the user's choice of account provider will determine what actions they can take on the fediverse as a whole. It is a wholly unfortunate state of things.

An interesting exception would be Owncast's "Fediverse auth" option for stream chatting. That sends a One-Time code to your mastodon inbox for authentication.

As @jackalope@lemmy.ml suggested, Solid would be a shoo-in for your "User Data" server. If, that is, Solid could shake off some of its sheer conceptual gravity. People say the fediverse has a geek problem, i.e. only geeks use it. Well, I think Solid has a worse version of that problem. It is only approachable by the deepest loremasters of geekdom. They are also still vague on its actual operation. What's more, they are still deliberating what their actual security model will look like.

Which makes me sad, because the Solid sounds exactly like what we architecturally need.

EDIT (3:25 am EDT): Just wanted to add on here, I really think that "linked data" and SPARQL were bad, possibly self-defeating decisions for the Solid project. I sorta see their motivation–they want that sweet, sweet flexibility. But I think this approach is not a good solution.

EDIT again: added links

It's probably worth the read, but it's a bit long. Maybe you could use a tts and upload an audio file to funkwhale, and link it in the article so we can listen to it.

I did only glance over the article. I like that you think about the fediverse and how to improve it. I'm amazed what's already possible even at this point right now. However I agree that especially the interaction of different Activity Pub implementations needs to become more natural to use. I want to be able to login with my account on every application on the fediverse, not to have to create one on each platform.

I wonder if Solid could be used to deal with federated ID?