“Works just like email” is always easy way to explain. Everyone who uses email understands that they can send a message to a @gmail.com account from a @yahoo.com account or any other server.
Ah yeah just like email. All I had to do to comment here from a different instance was:
- “Maybe if I click login it will somehow do federated login?” Nope.
- Ok what if I copy the
/post/<id>from the URL and paste it in my instance. Nope 404. - Hmm…
- Aha! I randomly noticed this text:
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
- I did that, but it eventually (takes like 10 seconds) came up with a load of random posts and comments from here.
- Maybe… if I click on
Fediverse memes@feddit.uk - 792 subscribers?
Success!
Just like typing in
someone@yahoo.com. 🙄- “Maybe if I click login it will somehow do federated login?” Nope.
- Ok what if I copy the
/post/<id>from the URL and paste it in my instance. Nope 404.
Yeah, these two are major pain points. They are unintuitive, i would argue. If you click “login”, it should ask you for your username. If your username is
lisa@bumblebee.com, it takes you tobumblebee.comand lets you finish the login process there.The
/post/<id>should have been fixed a while ago. I don’t know why it wasn’t.I don’t think the lack of “federated login” is unintuitive. You wouldn’t expect going to gmail.com and logging in with your Yahoo credentials to work, right?
Having a “federated login” service would probably either add a ton of complexity for instance owners, or someone would implement some super naive and insecure centralized solution, leading to a bunch of people’s creds getting stolen.
Getting the
post/<id>thing to work across instances would be a pain too, because it would require instances to all coordinate post IDs to ensure collisions don’t happen, since far as I can tell, the id in the URL isn’t globally unique.The motivation for federated logins would be that often you’re linked to a post on another instance, such as https://someinstance.net/post/12345 now when i click on that, in the web browser it opens on the other instance, and now what if i want to comment?
I agree that that specific use case is a pain, but I don’t think federated logins are the fix for it. Rather, links to posts on other instances should be automatically translated to a link to the federated version of that post on your home instance, such that you can interact with that post without having to re-log-in. There’s a bunch of issues in the Lemmy GitHub project related to this, so hopefully it gets implemented soon.
In my opinion, federating logins kind of defeats one of the main purposes of federation though, which is to give the user control over where their user information lives.
