No Stupid Questions

Very good point! I think @TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub has a good idea on how to circumvent that.

I could make my own database with hashed passwords using postgreqsl and RLS, which is pretty secure. The User then decrypts the hashed passwords once on login and is simultaneously logged into multiple instances of Lemmy to get the JWT of each instance, which is then stored in SessionStorage or even in a Cookie if the User wants to which would make this a one-time process.

On signup the User could just register to one instance and then I just generate random 32 Character passwords and hash them with the Users' password, then get the JWTs and if cookies are enabled the that would only have to be done every year or so (or when the User deletes the Cookies).

This whole process is seems pretty easy, especially if you've done something like this before and I'm betting some other App Dev is already taking notes lmao.

Edit: Let's also do a thought experiment on what data will be leaked if I did this 1:1 and the database gets somehow hacked:

For each User:

1. Username (=> Gives away that you use Nemmy)
2. Hashed Passwords (=> Hashed passwords cannot be read if you don't have the original Users' password until we have access to quantum computers which can literally crack the encryption algorithm)

I think the specific way that Lemmy/Kbin are growing is not exactly how the creators, particularly the Lemmy devs, envisioned it. I think they believed people of a specific interest or ideological leaning would band together on an instance, make a few communities that were relevant to them, and federation would allow their work to be shared and for them to venture out to participate in whatever they thought was neat. The best examples I can think of off the top of my head are probably Lemmygrad and the Star Trek instance that hosts three communities related to Star Trek (memes, general discussion, and deep-dive nerdery). I think the notion (I doubt it was a fully formed plan) was that instances would have relatively little overlap in the types of communities, and even less in the content.

How growth is actually happening is seems to be turning out fairly differently. Reddit is basically having these little spasms (or maybe just coughs at this point) where a few thousand people leave at once, and many of them are heading to L/K instances. Sometimes we don't quite fully understand federation when we arrive. Sometimes federation is down for a bit. People are basically flocking to established but previously tiny general instances with no particularly strong agenda, and seem to be creating communities with no particular concern about fragmentation.

This may not have been how federation was envisioned, but it creates its own kind of flexibility, where instead of X% of communities being at risk when an instance goes dark or goes crazy, it's Y% of content. I think giving users the option to adapt to this state of affairs by implementing something like persistent multireddits we could subscribe to or just a setting to "autocollate" identically named communities would be really helpful, eventually. In the meantime, trying to understand how we got here makes it easier to accept where we are, and hopefully lets me stay on the right side of the line between being a valued user and a pain in the ass, LOL.