Wasn’t there something already close to this? “OpenId”?..

Just stumbled upon this: https://wedistribute.org/2025/08/social-web-foundation-is-betting-big-on-client-to-server-api/

Let’s just hope…

Couldn’t IpenId fulfill this need? Do we really need to reinvent the wheel?

I wouldn’t mind having my identity just be a hash (of username@domain and some salt, for example) and have all other fediverse servers use that to authenticate and authorize me but display the username, logo, bio, etc that I had registered on that domain.

Maybe let me overide some information for context per site or inherit from the original id provider.

Then I could be known as FatFingersJoe at the guitar players site where I’m learning scales and SenseiJoe at the karate forum for my dojo. :-D

,or maybe I’m just missunderstanding this fediverse thing alltoguether! :-/

What I allways felt we needed was a federated identity system. Then all posts on a platform could just be followed on any other platform.

Now, joe@one.site has to create a separate account on other.site, but joe@other.site is already taken, so he has to go with doe@other.site and resort to solutions like this one to post to several locations at once.

What I whould suggest is to just create some kind of federated identity provider so that Joe can just be joe@joe.site and post on one.site, other.site or whatever.site he wants and have his posts federate magicaly throughout the fediverse.

Of course, moderation would have to be based more on user accounts than on nodes, I gess…

Wasn’t there something already close to this? “OpenId”?..

That’s my feeling as well, but… really? Randal Schwartz is hoping for me to follow him back?! The guy is a legend, I’m no one (literally - Ninguém means “no one” in portuguese).

As @floo@retrolemmy.com said, I can’t see a way for it to be nefarious except if it is some new kind of spam. But Randal wouldn’t exactly fit in “new people joining the platform without really understanding exactly how following people and following hashtags on mastodon is different than how it worked on Twitter or Instagram.”

Bah! I’ll just leave them there until they get tired of my boring conversations. 😁