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why can't we have federated identity ?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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There's a difference between a federated identify and single-sign on. Your identity /u/mango_master@lemmy.world IS federated. You don't need to have a separate login for each instance. You can use that identity to interact with any instance much the same way I am using my federated identity to currently respond to you.
This works great for apps. But I want to use the web interface to post a reply to content that’s not on my home instance. I can’t do that easily.
That should just work. You view the post on your own instance and reply there. That reponse trickles to the other instances.
It may take a while to propagate though. The paradigm is close to that of the ancient nntp news groups where responses travel at the speed of the server's synchronisation. It may be tricky for rapid fire conversation, but works well for comments of articles.
I believe they're talking about a situation where somebody is like ...
Anybody who sees that link and is not already from someother.instan.ce now has to track down that post on their home instance in order to interact with it, which is a bad experience. It's not the absolute worst thing in the world, like the home URL for the discussion we're in right now is https://lemmy.world/post/1194109 and if you paste that URL into your local domain's search it should find you the relevant discussion locally, but it still kinda sucks. In theory this would be sort of solve-able on the server end by having it search for any instance links behind the scenes and re-write other people's links to point to the equivalent page on your own instance, but right now there's no "nice" way to handle that situation.
Agreed on your point. We need a way to identify those links so that our browser or app can automatically open them through our own instance.
I am thinking along the lines of a registered resource type, or maybe a central redirect page, hosted by each instance, that knows how to send you to your instance to view the post there.
I am sure it is a problem that can be solved. I would however not be in favour of some kind of central identity management. It is to easy a choke point and will take autonomy away from the instances.