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Hi there! So I understand that federated systems can speak to one another and interact. My question I guess is should I be using my Mastodon account to log into PieFed, and PixelFed, and Bookwyrm? Or do I need to create specific accounts for all these services, just as I did before?

I understand that someone on Mastodon could potentially follow my PixelFed account and see my posts. But wouldn’t it make sense to have one single identity (if one wished) so it collected all of my stuff in one place? Just wondering if I am missing the point?

Sorry if I sound like an idiot here. I really love the idea of federated services, just want to make sure I am “doing it right” so to speak.

Nope, at least one account per service.

You can even have multiple account per service (very common to have multiple ones on different instances).

You can do that, but fediverse and threadiverse (Mastodon and Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin) are very different kinds of websites and it will lead to unexpected weirdness. Best to make a separate account for each type of thing (i.e. one for the twitter-like experience, one for the reddit-like, one for the instagram-like etc.).

In addition, you can interact with other services from one account, but not necessarily use them fully.

So as above ^^^ at least one account per service is advisable.

You are asking a reasonable question that many ask.

Each account will be a unique and separate account on each instance. Instances do not share accounts.

Although you can, on some applications, authenticate with a federated account, like Google or even a Mastodon account, you still will have an entirely different account on the server.

You don’t sound like an idiot at all.

You create an account on an instance/server. Your account is on piefed.social, which is a PieFed instance. However, you should really think of this as your piefed.social account, not as your PieFed account. You cannot login into PieFed with your Mastodon account, because you don’t have a “Mastodon Account”; You may have an account on a particular Mastodon instance (or server, whatever they call it), which allows you to login to that particular instance.

Mastodon, PieFed, Lemmy, etc. are more like the filter through which you interact with the Fediverse. To a Mastodon server, every post is independent, for example. On Lemmy, you may post to a community, but on Mastodon a community is just a group that boosts posts made to it.

The way I do it, and they way I think is best, is that you should pick a way you prefer to interact with the Fediverse. Do you prefer threads like Lemmy or PieFed? Do you prefer single posts to the void like Mastodon? I don’t really know how Bookwyrm works, exactly, but it’s also just a way to interpret the same underlying stuff so that it can be understood as books and book ratings and reviews.

There may be features missing or not implemented here and there, depending on the instance or the software.

I only really use my Lemmy account (the one I’m using right now), because I prefer threads. Some people even call Lemmy and PieFed (and some others) the Threadiverse.

There’s no wrong way. Just have fun. But be warned that any account on a different server is exactly that: a different account! And each account lets you interact with a server, meaning that you see the Fediverse thru the eyes of the software it’s running, be it Mastodon or Lemmy or whatever, and everything will be filtered that way.

That’s my understanding of it, anyway.

I have an account in the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed…) and one in microblogverse (mastodon, gotosocial…). just because they behave so differently it is not a great ux to be using only one.

in some instances it does make sense though. if your are not a heavy lemmy user and primarily use mastodon you could just @ the corresponding community in your posts. they will then show up normally here and you can still interact with it. (following communities on mastodon looks bad on mastodons end though)

or if you just want to comment or like a video on peertube you could just do that from any instance. peertube accounts also show up on lemmy like normal communities which is neat.

so in short if your are not planning on using something heavily it is probably enough to just use an account you already have. but like with everything you should just try things out and see what works best for you. :)

I would recommand at least two accounts per fediverse type (type = microblog, threadiverse…)

So you can have a backup account in case your instance is down. Because currently there is no sync of our subcriptions, follows.

I hope we will have a kind of nomadic identity to solve this.

It would be great if there was a “federated auth service” for all the instances. One account that you could use in each server you like.

When I first joined Lemmy I made accounts on lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and lemm.ee, since I didn’t have a solid idea of what instance to pick and wanted to have options. I was using the .world account when posting from a PC (because I liked Alexandrite) and sh.itjust.works on mobile. lemm.ee was a backup, though that whole instance ended up dying…

As soon as Boost started supporting piefed, I jumped ship and chose quokk.au simply because it’s the best name. Same reason I was on sh.itjust.works, really. My original two lemmy accounts are still around, but I don’t use them at all nowadays. They could come in handy if I ever need to make a lame joke about clones or bots or sockpuppets though.

The one account for all thing is often mentioned as a ‘selling point’, and as of now I think it’s rather ill-advised, setting up disappointment & possibly obershadowing a couple of nice things in that regard. A rather smooth part of the fediverse is that for example comments you read may stem from a lot of different corners, and writing one of those should work fine.

Regading number of accounts you could experiment with a min or max approach first and then adapt based on your needs and experiences. You could re-use the first half of your handle, as the comment about identity suggested.

Yeah, that’d be cool!

Create an account on mbin and it’ll allow seeing most of the fediverse. It has a microblog view, a thread view and a combined view. It isn’t picky about which services to connect to. I’m subscribed to peertube channels, people on pixelfed, and browse the threadiverse. It works well.

Lemmy can’t see mastodon, mastodon seems to have trouble seeing lemmy but can see mbin and piefed, peertube just sees peertube (although comments on peertube can come from all over the fediverse), pixelfed just pixelfed, and so on.

Someone mentioned nomadic identities and federated identities and I would love either of those. But for now, I recommend mbin.

I use Piefed and Lemmy. You can use one or all or any combination thereof but being on all of them would be a lot to manage. I started with Lemmy and am probably going to end up using PieFed (or maybe Mbin) because they have more features and better interfaces.

This used to come up a lot in meta-fedi talk on Mastodon. The general feeling (from my own observation) is that a central authority for user accounts would defeat one of the big advantages of decentralization: that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it. If all logins have to authenticate to a central service, then if that service is offline then nobody can log in anywhere.

There is capability for federated login in ActivityPub, though, it just doesn’t seem to be very widely adopted. Pixelfed has a “sign in with Mastodon” login option, where you can use your login on a Mastodon instance to authenticate to Pixelfed, and then presumably you can use Pixelfed with your Mastodon account instead of having a separate Pixelfed account. My masto instance doesn’t seem to support it so I don’t know what it looks like.

that one service going down does not bring the rest of the network down with it.

Yeah, I’ve heard something like that as well.

Still, having a bunch of accounts is a pain in the ass. Oh well!

I wish. its more where you make your account is sharing with other fediverse sites along with most of the federation not needing a login. I wish it had been setup for members of the federation to be able to do someting like samly with the rest of it.

I don’t know if it uses that system, but NeoDB lets you sign in with a Mastodon account too. It’s also fully Mastodon compatible, so you can add it to a client and use it as a basic Mastodon/microblog account if you want. It uses (a modified version of?) Takahē on the backend, a project which sadly appears to have been abandoned.

Neither Lemmy nor PieFed are able to follow Mastodon users, but Mastodon is able to follow/subscribe to Lemmy/PieFed communities, post to them and talk to their users. Following a busy Lemmy community from Mastodon will make the community flood a Mastodon user’s feed, though.

Mastodon can follow any Pixelfed account and vice versa, but Pixelfed will see only posts with photos and Mastodon will see no more than 4 photos per post. Pixelfed is able to post to a Lemmy community, but I did not try to follow a comm from there.

In fact, Mastodon is able to follow any account from any fediverse app, but all the content from this will be reduced to the lowest common denominator: a post, maybe with formatting.

I am also kinda new, but it seems like it leans towards multiple accounts. Some lemmy instances don’t federate, so I have two.

And then it seems like there is a alot of style and content overlapp between pixelfed and mastadon. So I just have a pixelfed account and follow a few folks from Mastond there.

It would be weird to see pixel fed type posts on my lemmy feeds, but I guess that is just how am using it so far

I’m thinking of a federated validation service. The check should be only the first time you use the instance and then at random to check if it’s still valid. And the service could have a journal of instances and send then a message if an account changes. This last part as an option.

The account should be the bare minimum data: name, password, contact and little more.

It would be really smart if devs just started implementing “sign in with Mastodon” or something on new projects but unfortunately they do not.

Can mbin browse Lemmy/piefed? I would love to only use one app/login if possible. If one application can correctly view/post to each service - then it would seem logical to just use the one. I might switch to mbin If it can browse Lemmy content.

For sure !piefed_meta@piefed.social is in the list of “magazines” (communities as they are known on mbin) and more communities too.