Consider it like your email. You can use yours to communicate with people using any service, but you can’t sign into a gmail account with outlook.
this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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That's a poor example, as Outlook basically is a mail client and you actually can use it to access your Gmail mails.
I think they meant Outlook.com, the e-mail service, not Outlook the software.
I also sign into Outlook.com with my Gmail account. It has its own inbox, which is weird, but hey.
Do you actually sign into Outlook.com with your gmail account, or are you just reusing credentials to sign into a separate account on Outlook.com? I'm not sure that the two systems federate, but I've got an Outlook.com account that uses my gmail email address as the username, but the account is completely separate.
Nah, like the other guy said, it's just OAuth. It's silly that they even let you do it, but hey, it is what it is.
That's using your Google account, with Google's OAuth, to get into an Outlook account — which is still weird and confusing, and IMO something Microsoft shouldn't have done because it'll confuse people, but hey.
"cn, email, uid" was such a choice of Web 2.0 that confused the hell out of so many people.
And this ambiguity is the exact reason why it's a poor example ;)
I was thinking whether I should add a remark that you can add your Gmail account to outlook.com as well, but I didn't want to over-complicate it. In the end, both Outlook (the program) and outlook.com are mail clients of a sort, the latter being a webmail client.
Outlook.com is a free, personal email service from Microsoft.
From Microsoft’s website. Depending on context, Outlook can be their email service similar to Gmail or a Desktop email client similar to Thunderbird.
Perhaps they were talking about Outlook.com
leaving out the technical aspects of what's possible and what's not... I get your point, and you're right.
I can't use the gmail android app to login with outlook credentials.
You can only use your account to log in to your instance. And the mastodon app only supports mastodon instances and jerboa is only for lemmy.
You can use the fediverse to interact with content from mastodon and lemmy from your home instance on kbin. For example I am writing this comment from lemmy.
Ok, how do I interact with my Mastodon and Lemmy accounts?
also i just tried kbin.social/u/@phoronix@noc.social and it gave me a 404, knowing phoronix being a reliable tech source.
Edit: but @sometestuser works as intended
sure, but I thought ActivityPub is a common protocol they all use to allow interoperability.
Like an API, where there are users, posts, images that can be created, liked and boosted.
I.e logging in to a mastodon app would allow me to create /browse madtodon-specific posts (microblogs), and logging in to pixelfed app, would allow me to only upload/browse images, etc...
ActivityPub has 2 parts: The Server to Server API (S2S), which is how instances communicate and is the backbone of federation. and the Client to Server (C2S) API, which is a way for instances to communicate with an app/website. Unfortunately, mastodon made the decision early on to go the proprietary API route instead of using the C2S for app development. The rest of the microblogging fediverse had to implement the mastoapi so that they could share app support. Lemmy and kbin don't use the mastoapi, which is why they aren't compatible with mastodon apps and they don't even implement the same API so their apps won't be compatible either.
Ideally, lemmy and kbin will migrate to a common API so their apps can be compatible. Even more ideally (and the original goal of the protocol), lemmy and kbin would use the C2S so that they could work with standard AP apps that also work with any compliant AP service.
aah, thx for the detailed explanation... So everyone doing their own thing, kinda defeats the purpose, or at least makes it harder for app developers to take care of all the different apis
Identity federation isn’t the main point of the Fediverse, though. Federation is just meant to distribute content and facilitate communication. So you can have a book blogger manage their reviews and bookshelf on BookWyrm, a vloger can upload a video on PeerTube, and a city government can share water outage updates on Mastodon, and someone can interact with that content from a single interface and account of their choice.
Yes exactly. If we want universal apps, we need to convince implementers to use the C2S. I also think the huge push to get native apps for kbin/lemmy was way too premature. I'm worried that's gonna lock in their current APIs and make transitioning to the C2S even harder.
I think we could start with an api alongside the existing one, and have it downward-compatible until everything is migrated, bit by bit.
That’s interesting. I’m not a huge supporter of it, but wasn’t account portability one of the reasons that Bluesky created their own AT protocol?
I don't know anything about Bluesky, but this has nothing to do with account portability. ActivityPub doesn't easily support account portability; your account is always on a single server. There are mechanisms to move your account to another server, but they're incomplete (you can't migrate your existing posts, etc).
The C2S is about allowing native apps that can work with any ActivityPub implementation. So in an ideal world, you could use a single app to access lemmy, kbin, calckey, pleroma, hubzilla, mastodon, wordpress, etc.
sure, but I thought ActivityPub is a common protocol they all use to allow interoperability.
It does, but it deals only with content, not with identity federation.
You can access and interact with content from other services that implement ActivityPub (but not all, not every service implements the whole stack).
You can access Kbin posts/communities from your Mastodon account. You can also send messages and see Mastodon content from your Kbin account.
It’s not that you can log in to all the sites with one login, it’s that you can access content from all the sites from one account.
If you have a kbin account, you can follow mastodon users from kbin, and they will show up in your microblog feed, looking like a native kbin post.
If you have a Mastodon account, you can follow kbin instances there, and posts appear on your Mastodon Home feed looking like native Mastodon posts.
To follow someone on either site, you copy their address or a URL into the search field of the respective site, and follow/subscribe to it like you would a native account. (That’s what the “copy URL to Fediverse” option is under the “more” option - it’s a URL to paste into the respective search fields so it pops up on that site.)
If you are logged into kbin.social you can interact with mastodon under the microblogging section. You will show up as a Kbin user but you can interact with it. This is the same as interacting with lemmy
The sign ons are separate but the interaction is the same
@adonis the quickest answer is that the clients you've explored are optimized for a specific fedi software. Pre-reddit meltdown most clients developed were designed for Mastodon and its forks or close cousins whose backend are coherent like Pixelfed. This includes the Mastodon app itself. There are other microblog softwares, like Calckey - they also don't parse the same way so most fedi clients for microblogs can't log you in to your Calckey instance.
With the threadiverse softwares, none of them are rendered the same way as Mastodon, so that's why you can't login with those clients. And with the threadiverse clients, currently what's available are software-specific - jerboa only works with Lemmy for example. Interoperable threadi clients are in heavy development though, if you don't mind waiting. At the moment there is no Kbin-optimized clients.
Sooooo for today, if you have a Masto-flavoured account, it's almost a given any of the popular clients can log you in. Hope that helps!
I didn't want to eta, so addition: what is being federated right now is readability and participation - with your kbin account you can absolutely interact with other fedi posts. But on the client-side options for a cross-platform one that can also be useable with a threadi login is still unavailable.
There is no need to login to other instances. Just browse them, and if you want to comment something copy the link and paste it in threads search (Lemmy) or microblog (mastadon) and you can interact with them. I hope in the future apps will make browsing much easier and seamless without copying and pasting links around.
There are browser add-ons for the desktop that help with that process.
It has more to do with implemented compatibility I'd day.
It's clear that once Kbin has a public API, many lemmy apps will probably offer compatibility, like Sync for example.
Artemis is the other way around, it's being developed for kbin, and it will add Lemmy compatibility down the line.
I imagine eventually the kbin apps will flesh out the microblogging aspect of it as well and allow better interface with mastodon.
There is no options yet for Single Sign On in the Fedverse as there is no one single instance/platform to rule them all. You sign on to your instance and through that you can visit other Fedverse instances/communities by searching from within your instance. Right now since Lemmy and Kbin and it's associated apps are so young the ability to visit other Fedverse platforms is not yet fully available so the abilities of your instance may be limited.
It's confusing, I know 😅 You use one account to log in to a platform you like and it should[¹] give you access to everything else through Federation.
[¹]: ActivityPub is the underlying protocol used by the majority of federated platforms, so it should work albeit on a basic level, because some platforms don't support advanced text-formatting, others are arranged in threads, etc. so, YMMV.
For this reason, I find it useful to have one account per platform.
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