Would something single sign on (SSO) even be possible? I think the convenience of having a single account for the family of federated platforms would be wildly convenient.
Of course folks could continue to have individual accounts on each platform if they wanted.
I also understand that it would create a very tempting target for hackers and it would need to use MFA (multi factor authentication).
Just a thought and I would like to see you all have to say.
Asking after having this discussion.
Honestly I think one of the bigger hurdles is the confusion about where to sign up. You have to choose an instance, preferably one that is “compatible” with you. But it hardly matters to the user because it’s all federated anyway. Just give me a server that will stay up.
This is why a single sign on that gives you access to ALL THE THINGS and would simply adoption.
Unless you unknowingly joined a community that was defederated by everyone else.
Yeah, I had joined Beehaw shortly before they defederated. I knew this happened, but I thought “meh, it’ll be alright”. I tried to make the best of it… but at the end of two weeks I was asking myself “Is this all there is to the fediverse? It’s pretty disappointing”.
So before I gave up on Lemmy and the fediverse, I looked for a new Lemmy server that wasn’t defederating nor defederated from the fediverse. Eventually, I settled on Lemm.ee and I see know just how much of the fediverse was being filtered out for me.
disclaimer: I don’t fault Beehaw for their decision to defederate. It is their choice to make, and I greatly admire and respect their transparency in the matter. However, for myself, I don’t need, want or appreciate these extra guard rails “to keep me safe”. I’m an adult and are willing to act and be treated like one.
You’ve raised another important thing I’ve never thought of: How do we even know how connected an instance is to other instances aside from hearing from other users. I didn’t even know Beehaw was defederated until you mentioned it.
Defederated from what though? I still see plenty of other community’s posts.
It’s not just two, it’s two “big” ones and a bunch of eg. neo-Nazi ones, Lemmygrad, spammers and so on. I vaguely remember there being some sort of blocklist that a lot of the instances use, but don’t quote me on that.
Lemmy’s vanilla UI has the list of connected and blocked instances under
/instances, so eg. https://beehaw.org/instancesBeehaw is only defederated from two instances iirc, so most of us are still able to see and interact with them.