#zotlabs — Public Fediverse posts

@Jens Ljungkvist :mastodon: @Jeff Sikes @Kainoa @Chris Trottier Something similar to "one account on all projects" is already in the works.

By and by, #Fediverse projects may adopt #OpenWebAuth, a #SingleSignOn implementation developed by @mike for #Hubzilla and currently implemented on Hubzilla, its direct predecessor #Friendica and its latest not-quite direct descendant, #Streams. An implementation is also in development on #Mastodon. It should not be confused with #OAuth and #OAuth2, these are something entirely different.

What OpenWebAuth is that it recognises logins elsewhere. When I'm logged into this Hubzilla account, and I visit another Hubzilla hub or maybe a Friendica node or a (streams) instance, it will automatically recognise me. And it will grant me some extra "guest permissions" like being able to post directly on the wall of another Hubzilla or (streams) channel.

What it does not do, however, is give me all the power on any Friendica node, Hubzilla hub or (streams) instance that a logged-in user with a user account has.

I can't go to another Hubzilla hub and create a clone of my channel or create a brand-new channel or post an article or start a wiki or upload files just with my OpenWebAuth login credentials. And when Mastodon introduces OpenWebAuth, I still won't be able to go to any one random Mastodon instance and start tooting. All this would still require a local user account on that one specific instance.

One account for the whole Fediverse is utopic. It's technologically impossible or just very very very unfeasible.

The Fediverse has 24,000+ instances of dozens of projects. If you want full local user power everywhere in the Fediverse, you'll need one registered account on each one of these 24,000+ instances.

Whenever someone joins mastodon.social, then RATATATATATATATATATATA, 24,000+ more accounts with the same login credentials will have to be created automatically.

Also, the Fediverse has 12,000,000+ users. If you want full local user power everywhere in the Fediverse, then everyone else must have it, too. So every single instance of each Fediverse project will have to have one account per Fediverse user. The only exceptions would be those very few projects which are designed for only one user account.

However, personal instances of projects that are designed for multiple user accounts will all be affected. The hapless Mastodon user who comes over to your personal Hubzilla hub to act like a registered user will neither know nor care if that hub is running on a root server in a data centre with two 36-core Xeon CPUs and enough RAM to make a 3-D CAD workstation cry or on a Raspberry Pi at your home.

Now, let's assume someone has set up a new Web server with some Fediverse project installed on it. It doesn't matter if that's Mastodon or #CalcKey or #Lemmy or #Mitra or (streams) or whatever as long as it has #ActivityPub. They start that thing up for the first time: sudo systemctl start nginx or so.

And RATATATATATATATATATATA TATATATATATATATATATATA TATATATATATATATATATATA TATATATATATATATATATATA TATATATATATATATATATATA TATATATATATATATATATATA, that poor thing will sit for WEEKS registering over twelve million user accounts.

Why? Because anyone in the Fediverse might come over anytime soon and want to use just this one specific instance as if they had registered their personal user account there. In order to be able to do that, they need a user account.

By the way, not even the notorious featherweight #Pleroma could handle 12,000,000+ user accounts on one instance. Mastodon can do that even less, not to mention the heavyweight Friendica or the super-heavyweight Hubzilla.

Speaking of Hubzilla, maybe a new Hubzilla hub might get away more easily when starting up for the first time. On Hubzilla, ActivityPub is optional per hub and then per channel. The hub admin can switch it on and off, and if it's on, the users can switch it on and off again for each one of their channels.

So if ActivityPub is off on the admin side by default, new Hubzilla hubs will only register one user account for each Hubzilla and (streams) user out there, maybe also for the users on the few remaining instances of the #Zotlabs projects that went EOL on New Year's Eve 2022, #Redmatrix, #Osada, #Zap, #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2020 and #Roadhouse. They all speak one native language, #Zot.

But once the admin activates the Pubcrawl app for their hub, that hub will immediately start registering user accounts for every user on every instance of every project that connects to Hubzilla via ActivityPub, each account with one channel with Pubcrawl on. And it will spend weeks or months doing so and not have any server resources left to do anything else in the meantime.

Speaking of Hubzilla, there's also #NomadicIdentity, the killer feature of the Zot protocol. Hubzilla has it, (streams) has it, and the (un)dead Zotlabs projects have it.

Ideally, each Fediverse user would not get one account on each Hubzilla hub and each (streams) instance with one separate, unique channel on it. They would first get the accounts. On one account on one Hubzilla hub, one channel would be created. This channel would then be cloned across all Hubzilla hubs and to (streams).

Advantage: Each Fediverse user would only have one channel for Hubzilla and (streams) together. They would have the exact same content on all Hubzilla hubs and, minus what Hubzilla can do that (streams) can't, all (streams) instances.

Obvious disadvantage: Whenever someone decides to do something on that channel, it would have to be synced to all its clones in near-real-time, causing a lot of network traffic.

And if you set up a new Hubzilla hub or (streams) instance, the creation of 12,000,000+ accounts would actually become a lesser problem. The bigger problem would be the 12,000,000+ channels that will be cloned onto your machine with everything on them. You'd better attach a few petabytes worth of HDD capacities to your personal little Raspberry Pi.

By the way, if everyone had full local user rights on each Fediverse instance, the Fediverse would have over 300 billion local accounts.

@Probably Paul 🌍 @maegul @Kevin Davidson @Ada #CalcKey has full #NomadicIdentity?

As in, you can have identical clones of your account/channel simultaneously on multiple instances? They're kept in-sync with each other in real-time? All clones display the same Webfinger ID which uses the domain of the primary instance? And you can make any clone your new primary instance?

Because this is what nomadic identity actually means.

The only projects known to me that support it are #Hubzilla, #Streams and the now-defunct #Zotlabs projects #Redmatrix, #Osada, #Zap, #Misty a.k.a. #Mistpark2020 and #Roadhouse, basically everything created by Mike Macgirvin after #Friendica.

In fact, I've got my doubts that full nomadic identity can be pulled off without having multiple channels per account/login. And this is another feature which the projects mentioned above have and the ActivityPub-based microblogging/macroblogging/"social network" projects don't.

Or are you referring to how easy it is to move your entire account with everything on it from one instance to another? That isn't what nomadic identity means.

Since #Streams isn't listed on any Fediverse website and probably never will, it's hard to find instances of it. But it isn't impossible.

There are two ways to do that. One is by finding a (streams) instance. Yeah, okay, that was a bad one. Try streams.hubzilla.social or Rumbly.

The other one, the one with learning wheels, is by finding an instance of one of the post-Hubzilla, pre-(streams) #Zotlabs projects because the-federation.info lists or used to list them. It still lists Zap.

Go to that instance. If it's (streams), you've technically found an instance. But where's the fun in stopping, no matter how inviting Rumbly appears? Let's find more. Let's go instance-hunting. If you've started on an instance of a Zotlabs project, you'll need to do that anyway because you aren't on a (streams) instance yet.

Next step: Click on the burger menu to the right on the navigation bar. (streams) has a menu entry named "Communities", the Zotlabs products had (or still have) "Sites". It's the same: It's where all Fediverse instances which have connected to this one are listed.

So there could be a (streams) instance or three somewhere, right? Yes. It's the more likely, the bigger the instance is.

The sidebar on the left lists projects; (streams) calls them "community types". You'll find lots of familiar names there. If you scroll down, chances are very good that there's "Streams". Bingo.

Now wait a second. Let me tell you a secret: Most (streams) instances don't identify as such. streams.hubzilla.social only barely does so, Rumbly doesn't at all. And those that do are usually personal instances with closed registration.

So let's go back to the list of projects/community types. The next part of the trick is to look at all those that don't sound like valid Fediverse projects. If you open them, and something with the ActivityPub logo shows up, you're extremely likely to not have found a (streams) instances (unless some prankster has used that same logo to identify their instance). If not, it might be a (streams) instance.

It's also worth looking at the old Zotlabs project names: Redmatrix, Osada, Zap, Misty/Mistpark2020, Roadhouse. All five can be upgraded straight to (streams). This has actually been done with some instances, and sometimes, the original branding/the last branding was kept in place.

Once you've reached this point, (streams) instances can be identified in various ways.

• Does it mention (streams) in its description, maybe even link to the code repository? Then it's very likely to be (streams).
  
• If not, does it have a date as its version, e.g. 23.04.18? Again, it's very likely to be (streams).
  
• Still unsure? Then visit it. If it has the same colour scheme as my Hubzilla channel, it's very likely to be (streams). The colours on my channel are a blatant ripo-, um, homage to (streams).
  
• The litmus test is the burger menu. If there's a Communities entry, it is (streams). If you find a description of the Zot API under Help, yup, it's (streams).

Before you join, go back to the Sites/Communities list where you came from and check the version. If it's a few months old already, chances are that there isn't much administration going on on this instance. If it's only a few hours old, don't worry, (streams) isn't so bleeding-edge that it's likely to blow up in your face.

Besides, remember that (streams) supports nomadic identity. If you're a cowa-, um, concerned about the resilience of your channel, you can always go nomadic on another instance or two.

If you've found a not-too-small-not-too-inactive (streams) instance, you can of course use it as your next base to go instance-hunting.

@ch0ccyra1n :ins: #NomadicIdentity is a concept created for #Hubzilla (another project in the #Fediverse that has #ActivityPub as an option, launched in 2012) and has therefore seen over a decade of everyday use. Starting with #RedMatrix, all projects launched by Mike Macgirvin after #Friendica under the #Zotlabs "brand" got this feature. The two projects still alive that have them are Hubzilla and the #Streams code repository.

In other words, this is nothing new. The #Zot protocol with its nomadic identity is older than ActivityPub and much older than #BlueSky.

It basically removes the fixed connection of your identity to the instance that you're on by allowing you to have your channel(s) on multiple instances at the same time, fully in-sync. I'm using this feature myself.

On Mastodon, your account is firmly tied to the instance that it's on. When you move to another instance, you can take your name and those whom you follow with you, but you'll create a new identity.

With nomadic identity, you could e.g. "move" to mstdn.social with your entire account with everything on it, but you could choose to keep your new account connected to your current one on emeraldsocial.org and either keep the one on emeraldsocial.org as your main account.

If you toot something, this toot will appear on your emeraldsocial.org account and your mstdn.social account. If you receive a post, it'll appear on both accounts, too. If you follow someone, you follow them from both accounts, but they'll only see the connection from whichever is your main account. If someone follows you, they'll always follow your main account, no matter which one they've decided to follow. If you switch your main account to mstdn.social, all your connections will be automatically updated.

Now, this is not limited to two instances. Theoretically, you can have your Hubzilla or Streams channel on as many instances as you want to.

(If you're wondering why I'm talking about "channels" rather than "accounts" in connection with nomadic entity: The projects that offer nomadic identity have this special feature that's basically "accounts within an account." You can have one account on an instance, but multiple channels, i.e. multiple separate identities, on the same account. And you can make each channel nomadic in different separate ways from one another.)

@smallcircles (Humane Tech Now) The list of apps isn't quite up-to-date anymore.

The old #Zotlabs projects #Redmatrix, #Osada, #Zap, #Mistpark2020 and #Roadhouse were discontinued as of December 31st and superseded by whatever you get out of the #Streams repository (#^https://codeberg.org/streams/streams).

Frage | Warum kann ich mich bei Zap nicht registrieren?

Ich wollte mir Zap einmal etwas genauer anschauen und mir deshalb auf dieser Instanz einen Account einrichten. Das Problem auf das ich gestoßen bin, ist das ich beim Registrieren sobald ich auf den Button Registrieren drücke das Formular wieder in leer angezeigt bekomme, also die Registrierung abgebrochen wird. Dabei ist es egal ob ich den Adblocker ein- oder ausschalte. Ob NoScript (natürlich mit Freigabe für die Seite) läuft oder nicht und ob ich einen VPN nutze oder nicht.

Habt Ihr ähnliche Erfahrungen gemacht oder wisst vielleicht sogar wo das Problem liegt?

Tags: #Frage #Hilfe #Zap #Zotlabs #Registrierung #Federation #Fediverse #Ravenbird #2022-01-13