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.

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[–] ivanvector@piefed.ca 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] bufalo1973@piefed.social 1 points 19 hours ago

I'm thinking of a federated validation service. The check should be only the first time you use the instance and then at random to check if it's still valid. And the service could have a journal of instances and send then a message if an account changes. This last part as an option.

The account should be the bare minimum data: name, password, contact and little more.

[–] gon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it.

Yeah, I've heard something like that as well.

Still, having a bunch of accounts is a pain in the ass. Oh well!

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 1 points 1 day ago

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.