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Idea of not distributing registrations is dumb. Sounds like they didn’t even tried to find something better. This defeats purpose of federation. Everyone will land on one instance because hashtags don’t federate and people will start moving to big instances.
We don’t need corpo sso. We need federated auth providers and org which can fund instances which want to be on “trusted list”
Wasn’t that the idea behind OpenID?
It’s possible with OpenID. All you need is extract domain from login id and get provider configuration at https://<DOMAIN>/.well-known/openid-configuration. Problem is that if it’s down you can’t login into same account using another provider.
Technically same way as google or apple SSO works just fixed list of domains. Another problem with using whatever domain user supplied is that some domains are more trusted than others, or rather owners. I don’t mean from privacy perspective I mean stability and security. It’s much easier to hijack domain of small server which struggles to pay for domain name consistently than google.
If Fediverse want to use OpenID for login someone have to vet trusted auth providers.
Otherwise we need someway to federate user logins. Maybe literally have replicated users credentials across instances. Then all federed instances can authenticate users from any federed instance.
Letting a random instance authenticate a random person as me is a terrible idea.
Can you explain why exactly? Particular scenario would be helpful to understand your POV
Because you can’t count on every instance playing by the rules. If anyone can set up an instance and authenticate any federated account, then they could also choose to impersonate me.
I won’t pretend I looked into authentication algorithm of every fedi apps but I doubt it’s “trust me bro” algorithm. Otherwise what would prevent malicious instance to post from your name today. Even if it’s some wacky algorithm it’s not a rocket science to enhance it. Message signing and public key sharing is one of common ways to solve this kind of problems. The only reason I see not to do it is lack of will or resources, or both
The only reason signatures work is because only your home instance can post as you. If you’re saying you want any instance to be able to authenticate any user, even if all the rest of the fediverse is down, then you’re eliminating that trust anchor (i.e., your home instance).
Currently, a malicious instance could pretend to post as any of ITS users, but NOT external users. The problem is if that instance is able to authenticate someone from a different instance, an you’re suggesting. Then, they could post as that user and propagate that action through federation.
The only way this could work is if YOU as the user had a public/private key your on YOUR device(s). Then, any action made on your behalf could first be required to be signed LOCALLY on YOUR device.
Problems with that approach are:
- Key management: Using the fediverse on multiple devices
- Trust: Where do I “register” my public keys? Again, you need some trusted third party/parties, which defeats your idea of absolute decentralization. Who decides which key store instances are to be trusted? How does the registration work? For example, what if you have two such public key stores (decentralization much) that either don’t federated together or they take some time to do so. What if the users register their own distinct public keys for the same username but in the two different public key stores? Trying to solve that requires either a fully centralized node or going into the dangerous territory of crypto bros (blockchains, i.e., some form of “majority” vote on which of the users is “allowed” to live on on).
To explain why the comment below is correct, you are right that the other instance couldn’t get your password. They don’t need that to create a post/comment that is supposedly sent from an account though. Those aren’t cryptographically signed or anything like that. It just says “this user sent this message”.
I don’t even think there is a way you could do this with some kind of cryptographic signature, unless it basically just sends an encrypted message to the home server and it verifies it, which then we have the same issue we started with of relying on a single server. I guess every message could be sent with a key, which can be disputed later. If the home server is unavailable, the message is sent, but it can later say that it’s a forgery when it comes back online. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s the only way this could even possibly work I think.
Pixelfed instance I’ve chosen went down for like a week already. Dark side of decentralised web 😑
start rant/
Ah yes, dansup, aka the Fediverse superstar who cranks out such hits as “VAGUE FEATURE is Coming Soon”, and “The rarely updated official app for Pixelfed/Loops is going to get updated soon!”. Both of those are from the album" I insist on gatekeeping outside developers from contributing".
I’ve interacted with him as a fellow developer of the same stack he uses, and I have always appreciated where his heart is at regarding the fedi. But, the track record of quality work suffers from chasing shiny objects, and absolute spaghetti code.
Also, I’m going to be blunt in saying this; he apes existing ideas (insta, TikTok), gives them a quasi corpo social platform facade with the goal to be welcoming to the refugees who jump the fences.
This SSO thing is the antithesis of decentralization and the spirit of digital sovereignty. Literally handing Google more user data for the sake of fedi adoption via SSO is mind boggling. How many people here left big tech because of the blatant surveillance state that’s been built?
I keep trying to support his work, but I’m killing my Pixelfed and Loops accounts.
/rant
Yuck
The thing I don’t especially like at this approach is that this is restricted to only pixelfed.social. Was Piefed doing the exact same thing? I remember Kbin and now Mbin allows for every instance to use their desired SSO.
