Just like apps and websites implement “Sign in with Apple” and Google couldn’t we build some kind of federated authentication provider? Then everyone creates an account there and fedi apps can implement an easy way to authenticate users. Even non fedi apps could use it. I imagine user interaction between different fediverse platforms would be much easier too.
I guess could run an auth instance. Ideally everyone would run their own, keeping your data safe.
Is there something likes this already? Saw some discussion here but not much else https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/single-sign-on-for-fediverse/712
As others have mentioned in the comments, this might not really work because websites/services would have to trust a bunch of tiny, maybe even single-user instances.
I can see a world where sign-in with Fediverse is possible, but only for a select few instances such as .world, .ml, .ee, and a few other highly-moderated servers.
I think you’re right. This might be the biggest problem but it doesn’t seem impossible to solve.
I believe it’s actually possible to sign in with mastodon on Pixelfed. Wouldn’t that work for a single user mastodon instance too?
You’re right. I’m not sure if it works with single-user instances, but I believe it does. This is the sort of thing that is technically possible — I believe ActivityPods aims to do something about it, too — but I don’t know… I guess federation can be a bit of a safeguard for this, like having a list of flagged instances that don’t allow account creation; requiring certain thresholds of account age or activity to be passed; stuff like that. There’s also the fact that, being social media, no instance wants bots to run wild, so that could, itself, be a check on that sort of thing, and it might not be economically viable to just host an instance strictly for bot-login purposes, so that is just an inherent barrier to wrongdoing.
Meh, maybe it’s more feasible than not.
That looks interesting too, thanks!