@DaughterOfMars That’s why you do your research and create an account on a successful instance so you don’t have that problem. I have a lemmy account and mastodon. I have lemmy because of the blackout but didn’t know what I was doing. I note know how to use lemmy and mastodon from the user side of things. Lemmy for my subs and general looking at the sub home page and communities. Mastodon to chitchat and everything else

I think number 1 is important so it’s easier to move. Otherwise we could feel centralized to one instance rather than feeling free to federate

The idea of federating communities does sound like a good idea. Now that I think of it I'm surprised that isn't already a thing.

@DaughterOfMars

For #1 - ive thought about that.

My thought would be something like a small LDAP type server. Self-hostable. You make a user like myuser@mydomain.net and its honored as a log in for the various fediverse stuff.

So like it could hold the subsciptions for the communities on the various threadiverse servers you connect to localy, and when you open say lemmy.ml, part of the info sent for your user would be a list of communities you are subscibed to on lemmy.ml.

If it just handles the user auth, then it could also be a user auth for other fedivers stuff too. PixelFed, and Mastodon, etc. Each service could have its own sub section of the user object's info.

You would still probably end up with a "home" instance you would use, but if that home instance becomes untenable, or goes away, then you would just pick a new instance and log in there with your myuser@mydomain.net account.

Im not a good enough dev to code it, but thats my idea anyway.

You can create a one-person instance and hold your identity there.

If you what you want is for every server to hold your identity, you have to trust all servers. I think that an evil admin would be able to impersonate any user from any instance if that were the case. How do you delete your account? Can an any admin delete your account everywhere? Which one is the real "you"?

I don't understand the first one, why would we want that? Wouldn't it be enough to make it possible to move accounts similar to how mastodon does it (but including your local content)?

My bigger problem is that if a instance goes down then the community is gone. I like how Matrix has solved it that you can have aliases and the content gets replicated on other servers, etc. Then even if people defederate then you still have your old copy and people can keep using it.

How do decentralized identities interact with unique usernames? By Zooko's triangle, if identities are distributed and secure (implied by unique), the names are not human-meaningful. So we would be identified by public keys rather than usernames, like Tor onion addresses. Am I understanding this right?