this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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I sort of just assumed you could view PixelFed content with a Mastodon account anyway? Would this effectively create a second identical account?
You can view Pixelfed from Mastodon, but the interface of Mastodon is more focused on text microblogging than on image sharing. By federating the logins they are kind-of making an SSO of sorts, so now you can use the full pixelfed interface but your suscriptions and history stay on your Mastodon instance and just federate over to the pixelfed instance you are login into.
That's how people new to the fediverse were expeting it to work (myself included when I joined last year), so it's nice to see it starting to shift that way.
Right, the ability to port your social graph with you is the benefit here.
Don't believe that's how it works. It's not SSO (which would be AWESOME). That will create an actual local account on other servers. This is still your mastodon account 'viewing' a pixelfed account via the ActivityPub protocol. It's just the 'view' that's different for different services (very broad definition). Viewing a pixelfed account/profile via a pixelfed instance shows you a photo gallery that has text with each photo (not alt text). Viewing that same pixelfed account from a mastodon account, you'd see a series of toots/posts text that happen to mostly have pictures. The reverse view of pixelfed looking at a Mastodon account, not sure but I'd guess just a mostly empty photo gallery with text associated?
Yeah, it's not SSO, that's why I wrote "of sorts", but the post is precisely of how Pixelfed will now allow Mastodon users to log into a Pixelfed instance with their Mastodon account, meaning they will not see the current view of pixelfed as looked from a Mastodon interface but should look as if the user had a pixelfed account, since they are using the pixelfed interface.
It's not released yet, so I have not tested it, but hopefully soon.