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. 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.
Federated logins make sense for forums and websites where you have access to content such as PeerTube.
For forums, logging into the forum with your fediverse account would actually be ideal since you can use a forum-style interface to navigate the topics, which would be easier than trying to navigate the same topics on Mastodon. Same thing with PeerTube. You may want to watch videos on PeerTube and comment right on their website without creating a PeerTube account. With federated single sign on, you can post with your existing fediverse account.
We have that on Hubzilla and it is called OpenWebAuth. We can log into other instances and comment directly on their instance as ourselves after logging in.
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. 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.
Federated logins make sense for forums and websites where you have access to content such as PeerTube.
For forums, logging into the forum with your fediverse account would actually be ideal since you can use a forum-style interface to navigate the topics, which would be easier than trying to navigate the same topics on Mastodon. Same thing with PeerTube. You may want to watch videos on PeerTube and comment right on their website without creating a PeerTube account. With federated single sign on, you can post with your existing fediverse account.
We have that on Hubzilla and it is called OpenWebAuth. We can log into other instances and comment directly on their instance as ourselves after logging in.