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Is the Fediverse stalling? (lemmy.relayeasy.com)

I'm genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)

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[-] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com -4 points 5 months ago

Bluesky blew itself up cos they failed to be sufficiently decentralised and became an echo chamber. Activpub systems are less echo chambery but still have a very strong left lean that is significantly effecting out ability to grow especially among the centre who represents the majority. We need more right wing opinions and allow said right wing opinions if we want the majority of people to adopt it.

The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.

[-] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Bluesky blew itself up? What happened to bluesky?

[-] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 5 months ago

There usage numbers are dropping alarmingly. And all the famous people on it went back to twitter.

[-] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Wow... I wouldn't have expected that. I much prefer the fediverse but that's still a real shame

[-] Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com 2 points 5 months ago

The fundamental failure of the fediverse that is limiting us is that accounts are not transportable. We need some decentralised ledger of accounts that can be cryptographically verified with a zero trust system. U just set up a oidc server to do that auth and that plugs into every single fediverse application everywhere.

I've never felt this was as important as people say, at least here in the Threadiverse I don't see it being important. Can you explain how this would help Lemmy/PieFed?

[-] Cris_Color@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

A lot of right-wing beliefs have become so extreme that I am frankly happy to not be around them, regardless of how important I feel it is to avoid echo chambers (very). Its one thing to want to be able to have conversations with people you disagree with even though it's challenging, it's another thing to constantly have to contend with people who would like to debate whether you're a human and deserve basic human dignity because you're a minority.

But I would appreciate if we could at least manage not to attack other left wing folks over not being left wing enough, or over what methods are a productive way to solve the problems we're facing.

It's kind of just a microcosm of the infighting and purity testing of the left more broadly (at least in America, I have no idea how things are with the culture of leftwing communities or voices in Europe or the rest of the world), but it still sucks and I'd like to hope we can find a way to do better.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 5 months ago

OIDC gives you federated login, but no portable identity...

[-] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Oidc is the protocol by which auth can happen its the evolution of oauth. U need to build some kind of decentralised ledger then u set up a server that checks that ledger against the user provided auth then u simply make this server have an oidc endpoint allowing it to be plug and play with existing fediverse services.

I say oidc cos almost all fediverse software is already compatible with it.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 5 months ago

My point is: if you have a ledger that the user controls and can use to redirect to different auth endpoints, then you don't need oauth. You just use the record in the ledger as the authentication mechanism directly.

[-] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 5 months ago

Yeah exactly. But instead of having to implement that auth process in every different fediverse service in however many different languages u simply write it once with an oidc endpoint and all fediverse services can run it as a container in their stack. It makes implementing such auth system a simple config change and updating a docker compose to add a new service.

[-] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It looks like we are talking past one-another.

What I am trying to say is that "getting the user to complete a login" is not the novel part that is missing. What we are missing is a way for the user to have control over their actor ID, so that they use the same id regardless of what server that id is delegated to.

So, unless I am misunderstanding you, what you are proposing is an OIDC provider which could be used to authenticate on any other service. That's good, but it doesn't solve the problem that if we had an unified OIDC provider without a DID, all of the actor ids would end up dependent on the OIDC provider.

[-] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 5 months ago

Ahh I see what ur saying now. Yeah the actor id is hard as it needs to be an actual dereferenceable uri as actors need an inbox and outbox of activities.

I don't think u can maintain cross instance actor ids. The only issue I see with having multiple actor ids for the same user is that they will have their content and profile split across multiple instances.

I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?

[-] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 5 months ago

I guess u could have a meta id that dereferences to all ur actor ids?

Yes, that would be ATProto's did:plc system.

[-] muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 5 months ago

Ahh I see I've never looked into how atproto works might need to look into it and sees if some of its systems can be adapted for Activpub. Thx for the info

[-] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 5 months ago

If you are keen on working on something like that, let me know. I've done some preliminary work to get a DID system that would work like did:plc but I got a bit stuck trying to use a decentralized database based on IPFS as the "ledger" mechanism.

this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
48 points (94.4% liked)

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