this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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But a central authentication authority would be antithetical to the federated platform ethos. If the central authority goes under or goes rogue, everyone on the platform is boned. The goal of federation is to avoid exactly that.
Yes, which makes the system harder to use, ergo all the comments from normies. There are obvious advantages to federation, but I wish people stopped pretending there aren't any trade-offs.
Honestly, it could be a UX solution, that doesn't need a fundamental change in federation. I can already post as myself to lemmy.ml, even though my account isn't there. So a solution that transparently does exactly that, but while I'm browsing the lemmy.ml instance should be possible. Somewhat similar to how following people on Mastodon on different instances opens a popup for login, then follows them. Honestly, even just an easier/automated way to map from to would help. Currently, it's all instance specific IDs. If posts/comments/etc had a similarly global ID system as communities there'd be a lot less problems. Visiting that post would simply mean replacing the host part of the URL, something a browser plugin could take care of.