Hi there! So I understand that federated systems can speak to one another and interact. My question I guess is should I be using my Mastodon account to log into PieFed, and PixelFed, and Bookwyrm? Or do I need to create specific accounts for all these services, just as I did before?
I understand that someone on Mastodon could potentially follow my PixelFed account and see my posts. But wouldn’t it make sense to have one single identity (if one wished) so it collected all of my stuff in one place? Just wondering if I am missing the point?
Sorry if I sound like an idiot here. I really love the idea of federated services, just want to make sure I am “doing it right” so to speak.
You don’t sound like an idiot at all.
You create an account on an instance/server. Your account is on piefed.social, which is a PieFed instance. However, you should really think of this as your piefed.social account, not as your PieFed account. You cannot login into PieFed with your Mastodon account, because you don’t have a “Mastodon Account”; You may have an account on a particular Mastodon instance (or server, whatever they call it), which allows you to login to that particular instance.
Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy, etc. are more like the filter through which you interact with the Fediverse. To a Mastodon server, every post is independent, for example. On Lemmy, you may post to a community, but on Mastodon a community is just a group that boosts posts made to it.
The way I do it, and the way I think is best, is that you should pick a way you prefer to interact with the Fediverse. Do you prefer threads like Lemmy or PieFed? Do you prefer single posts to the void like Mastodon? I don’t really know how Bookwyrm works, exactly, but it’s also just a way to interpret the same underlying stuff so that it can be understood as books and book ratings and reviews.
There may be features missing or not implemented here and there, depending on the instance or the software.
I only really use my Lemmy account (the one I’m using right now), because I prefer threads. Some people even call Lemmy and PieFed (and some others) the Threadiverse.
There’s no wrong way. Just have fun. But be warned that any account on a different server is exactly that: a different account! And each account lets you interact with a server, meaning that you see the Fediverse thru the eyes of the software it’s running, be it Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever, and everything will be filtered that way.
That’s my understanding of it, anyway.
It would be great if there was a “federated auth service” for all the instances. One account that you could use in each server you like.
Yeah, that’d be cool!
This used to come up a lot in meta-fedi talk on Mastodon. The general feeling (from my own observation) is that a central authority for user accounts would defeat one of the big advantages of decentralization: that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it. If all logins have to authenticate to a central service, then if that service is offline then nobody can log in anywhere.
There is capability for federated login in ActivityPub, though, it just doesn’t seem to be very widely adopted. Pixelfed has a “sign in with Mastodon” login option, where you can use your login on a Mastodon instance to authenticate to Pixelfed, and then presumably you can use Pixelfed with your Mastodon account instead of having a separate Pixelfed account. My masto instance doesn’t seem to support it so I don’t know what it looks like.
I don’t know if it uses that system, but NeoDB lets you sign in with a Mastodon account too. It’s also fully Mastodon compatible, so you can add it to a client and use it as a basic Mastodon/microblog account if you want. It uses (a modified version of?) Takahē on the backend, a project which sadly appears to have been abandoned.
Yeah, I’ve heard something like that as well.
Still, having a bunch of accounts is a pain in the ass. Oh well!