When discussing Fediverse, you sometimes hear the idea that you shouldn’t need different accounts for different platforms.
The “why can’t I comment under Youtube video with my Twitter account”.
In Fediverse it already works to some extent. You can comment under PeerTube video with your Mastodon account, and you can participate in Lemmy thread with your Mastodon account.
What is this functionality called? Does it have specific name?
It’s probably not “single sign-on” and not “federation” from what I understand.
And to what extent is it implemented? Is there some way to participate in Lemmy thread with your PeerTube account?
Is there any progress being made on implementing the initial idea of using any Fediverse account with any other Fediverse platform?
What is the name for the problem of implementing or mapping the platform-specific functionality? As in, neither Mastodon nor PeerTube have the interface for upvoting and downvoting posts.
Wouldn’t it be easiest to implement Fediverse-wide SSO (as in, log into Lemmy interface with your Mastodon account) instead of figuring out some funky mapping and patform interactions?
It’s probably not “single sign-on” and not “federation” from what I understand.
It is federation. I think you’re equating federation to Lemmy talking to Lemmy. But in reality, federation doesn’t care whether you’re Lemmy, Mastodon, or whatever.
There are incompatibilities between projects of course. Lemmy works best with Lemmy. Piefed works best with Piefed. Mastodon works best with Mastodon. Etc. But they do all federate.
SSO would be great to see. Iirc Mastodon has it to an extent. That said, SSO doesn’t solve the same problem as federation. They should coexist, not replace each other.
There are projects with a wider or more narrow compability focus. As a Lemmy user, you’re not quite on the best threadiverse platform there in that regard. Lemmy is very narrow in its scope. Mbin and Piefed are the places to be if you want more interactivity with the wider fediverse beyond the Lemmy world. Though I wouldn’t suggest piefed.social specifically to a lemmy.ml user.
The fediverse is already, by itself, designed to be a framework for this exact thing.
The problems we have, and are always going to have, are that not all pieces of backend software have the same functionality. For example, you can already follow Lemmy communities and users from Mastodon, but not the other way round. If one backend implements some piece of functionality (e.g. upvoting/downvoting), then all backends that haven’t implemented it are going to be incomplete in how they can interact with it. It’s not possible to implement every conceivable functionality in all backends, that would actually kinda defeat the purpose of having different backends.
As for your idea of “fediverse-wide SSO”: there already is an open standard for SSO called OpenID. Fediverse instances could be OpenID providers if that’s desired. But that’s still a separate thing from ActivityPub.
Usually we call things like that platform compatibility. It’s because we all kind of agreed on on common protocol: ActivityPub. That’s why those platforms can all talk to each other.
And the Fediverse isn’t the only platform leveraging common, open standards… It’s roughly the same with Email… I can view websites from all kinds of very different servers… We have interconnected chat services…
Wouldn’t it be easiest to implement Fediverse-wide SSO […] instead of figuring out some funky mapping and patform interactions?
Yes, that would be easier, but it wouldn’t be desirable. We don’t want centralized social media (https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started#old-social-media). I don’t want to log in on another instance, or even just open it and figure whatever unintuitive interface they’ve invented. The Fediverse has agreed on using ActivityPub as its common language, and individual softwares utilize and extend it as they see fit. This usually means that users of different instances with different software can talk to each other, albeit with some quirks like mastodon users having to tag op or Lemmy users being unable to PieFeds emoji reactions. Sometimes though the various social-medias work too differently for them to be compatible, like how on Lemmy you follow communities, whereas on mastodon you follow users.
I don’t think fully federated identities are desirable.
I wonder how it would even possible without overloading the account with tons of different data for all the different platforms.
I mean, yes, it would be possible but the amount of work that needs to go into the server, and the amount of data that each account holds on that server in my eyes simply not justify that.
