Until you say a naughty word on some forum, and Google bans your account and you cannot log in anywhere.
Or you say a naughty word on some forum and Microsoft bans you, so your GH account gets closed, your xbox stops working and you have to wipe Windows and install Linux and hope like hell that you have a local copy of all your 365 docs.
Far fetched? Maybe it is, but I feel less anxiety by having separate accounts everywhere.
If you're afraid of Google and Microsoft, you don't need to create a Google or Microsoft account with federated websites.
It's not like Google or Microsoft are ever going to bother with ForgeFed or any other type of ActivityPub for that matter. They would totally drop email if they could convince their customers to exclusively communicate through Teams/GChat.
For federated protocols, you can run your own server, or use a medium sized hosted service. If this gets merged upstream into Gitea eventually, you could use Codeberg or one of the many other Gitea servers out there.
If you want to deal with a million accounts, you can. There's nothing stopping you from registering accounts for every service you use even if this takes off and everyone else moves on to federated services.
> If you want to deal with a million accounts, you can. There's nothing stopping you from registering accounts for every service you use even if this takes off and everyone else moves on to federated services.
I apologise for any confusion; I wasn't contending that ForgeFed would prevent me from using individual accounts, I was contending the statement
> What happened is that it massively sucks.
IMO, it doesn't. It sucks, but not massively so!
Maintaining individual accounts across, maybe, six or seven providers[1], does indeed suck, but not massively so, and not enough to go to the trouble of maintaining my own instance within a federated system.
[1] I will probably never have anywhere close to a million individual accounts at code-hosting providers, even if it were federated. There will also never be more than a handful of providers where 99.9% of everyone goes.
As we've seen again, and again, and again ... any distributed system (like cryptocurrency exchanges, federated social networking, etc) slowly consolidates into three, maybe four places that get almost all the traffic/users.
It becomes centralised.
Is there any reason you think that this time, with ForgeFed, it will be different?
Federated systems are a technical solution to a social problem, which is why it always fails - i.e. results in centralisation eventually. If you have any examples where the result truly is normally distributed amongst all the instances I'd really like to see that.
> [1] I will probably never have anywhere close to a million individual accounts at code-hosting providers, even if it were federated. There will also never be more than a handful of providers where 99.9% of everyone goes.
I think we're talking past each other. I celebrate the move towards federated systems because if done right I won't need accounts on a bunch of individual systems. Unlike today where I do have individual accounts on multiple different code hosting sites.
> Is there any reason you think that this time, with ForgeFed, it will be different?
It's irrelevant to me if 99% of users are on a single ForgeFed instance as long as it's still federated so I don't need to be there if I don't want to but can still interact.
ActivityPub support also means that even if they do nothing to provide easy migration, spidering all the relevant content to move it elsewhere if a dominant ForgeFed instance goes rogue is easy.
> It's irrelevant to me if 99% of users are on a single ForgeFed instance as long as it's still federated so I don't need to be there if I don't want to but can still interact.
Only if you're running your own instance, otherwise you're at the mercy of whoever's instance you are on: if they decide to cut off some other instance for whatever reason, then, no, you won't see that other instance without running your own instance.
And if you do federate with rogue instances, your own instance will be rejected from the popular ones anyway.
It's a social problem, not a technological one, so you get all the downsides of centralisation with none of the upsides.
> Only if you're running your own instance, otherwise you're at the mercy of whoever's instance you are on: if they decide to cut off some other instance for whatever reason, then, no, you won't see that other instance without running your own instance.
And if I sign up to individual servers, they could ban me. There are risks in every model, but unlike in a centralised model, with a federated system I get to choose along a wide spectrum with respect to which risks I'm prepared to take. I could just sign up to the dominant server if I'm comfortable with that. I can pay someone to run an instance for me, I can run my own, I can find an instance run by someone I trust. The worst case is that I get the same upsides and downsides as in a centralised system.
> It's a social problem, not a technological one, so you get all the downsides of centralisation with none of the upsides.
To me this notion that there are upsides is comical, because of the above. I get choice. That's an upside. For my Mastodon setup I opted to run my own private instance because it gives me a level of control of the interface, and who I federate with and a number of other things that I don't get from the big instances. For Lemmy, I couldn't be bothered, because it's not (for now anyway) important enough. For ForgeFed, who knows, we'll see. But unlike with a centralised system, when I make that choice I don't choose away communication with all of those on other instances.
So to me, it is strictly better, and your hypotheticals are irrelevant because my worst case is to go back to the centralised model and register an account with a dominant instance.
The premise of ForgeFed is that you'd have one account but that one account would not need to be under the control of a corporation, you could have a private instance that you used interact with all open source software projects.
> The premise of ForgeFed is that you'd have one account but that one account would not need to be under the control of a corporation, you could have a private instance that you used interact with all open source software projects.
Yes, but maintaining my own private instance sucks more than remembering a handful of account credentials.
You don't need to. You get the choice. So if you want separate accounts on multiple sites, nobody stops you. If you want to run your own, nobody stops you. If you want to trust a given instance nobody strops you.
But likewise, if you don't want to trust provider A, but do trust provider B, nobody stops you *even if you want to interact with projects at provider A.
ActivityPub instances can relay messages, but generally they don't unless it's a dedicated relay that instances have to specifically sign up to receive messages from. Most instances are not subscribed to any relays, but only receives messages addressed to at least one user on that instance.
2FA, for one. The only time I created an account and someone's dedicated GitLab instance, they had mandatory 2FA enabled, which is a lot of hassle to just be able to submit an issue.
