I recently re-tried NOSTR (I technically have an old account I rarely ever use), specifically on Primal and the Fountain Podcasts app, and I really enjoyed how simple it was: just sign in, and BAM—you’re in.
No fuss, no extra steps.
It got me wondering—why doesn’t the Fediverse work like that? I know that using special login codes might be too complex for most people, but why not allow usernames and passwords instead?
Imagine a single sign-in for the entire Fediverse. You wouldn’t need to worry about instances, and onboarding could be much simpler.
Has this idea been considered, or is there a technical reason why it wouldn’t work?
Idk about nostr, but yes, the decentralized nature of the fediverse makes this very hard/impossible. Who has the authority on what’s your login? What if I don’t want a user to login on my instance because they’re a known spammer? Etc
Nostr is a lot smaller than fedi so these questions are still being answered there, and they do have their own problems with spam. Since users are identified by keys and can theoretically pop up and start posting on any node, it makes some questions of handling spam and abuse potentially function a lot differently than they are on fedi. If you were gonna do a shared blocklist it would need to be a shared blocklist of keys, etc. As for the emergent properties of that and how it affects the character of the network… probably just gotta keep watching how it plays out.