Some more spitballing from a noob here, but I wonder if much thought has been given to account portability between Lemmy instances, or even Fediverse apps in general.
So far, from what I can see, accounts are pretty much siloed. Two opportunities off the top of my head:
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Export your account, including all posts, comments, and user metadata and customization. This actually might be legally required by some jurisdictions, although I’m no lawyer. GDPR might not be applicable for one reason or another but I think the spirit of the law is good.
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Single sign on. This is perhaps a little harder to implement, but it might be nice to be able to participate on another fediverse app without having to research instances and sign up. Also nice to try out different instances of the same app before committing to one.
Two older threads about the same topic:
In an SSO scenario, your home instance would still need to be around to act as the IDP. I don’t think that adds much in terms of functionality over what we have now.
The ability to backup and migrate your account is critical to prevent losing your data if an instance goes down. SSO wouldn’t help you in that scenario.
Yea SSO is actually really easy to implement, I wouldn’t mind that
It’s come up a few times, as well as what I’m about to mention, but it’s still worth mentioning since it’s expressly made to better enable this, the Zot protocol was made with a nomadic/portable identity in mind.
I’m guessing there must be a reason it’s not been adopted though, but I’m not sure what the reasoning may be.
I’d love the second option, utilizing SSO so that I can effectively have the same account over different protocols/instances. I feel like that’s far down the wish list overall of what we’ll see coming though.
It would be convenient to have a Fediverse wide login, but it would carry too much baggage in terms of overhead and security. They’d have to carry the whole of the user database across all of the Fediverse, not really feasible. Then there’s security concerns over sensitive data like email and passwords. So probably not something that could ever happen.
A sync feature between instances might be do-able. Could be handy. I have a couple instances where I’d like to sync community subscriptions.
There would not be a need to duplicate or sync all user databases across the fediverse to support SSO. In fact SSO already exists in other contexts and I haven’t heard of any implementation that works that way. It’s essentially accomplished by the authority and the service exchanging login tokens.
