I wonder if the tech solutioneers trying to create* a single fediverse identity ever talk to real people. In the real world, we maintain many identities, and they're separate on purpose. Sometimes our lives literally depend on it.
(Edited to change “force” to “create” because, no, no one is forcing anyone to do this. I meant “forcing into existence” but don’t wanna get off track about it.)
@fraying Q: where did ”force” enter the discussion? A: in your comment and nowhere else.
What about a possibility where I can create 300 accounts, all different, and you can create one account, all the same?
”in the real world we maintain many identities”. Yes and no.
I have three credit cards all in different names. I use a different identity for my work as an activist from the one that I use as a government agent. Trust me.
You say ”I have a need to protect my identity from…” I say ”so you do”.
Nobody is suggesting that you cannot and should not do that. We are simply saying that some people want to share stuff on multiple platforms and they should be able to, if they wanr, by using the same name.
@owen people can already post several places using the same name. I do it right now. What you’re really saying is that the convenience of using the same account outweighs the good of separate identities. And I think that’s just straight up wrong.
@fraying No I am not. I am saying that if some people want a unified digital identity then it does nothing to those people who don”t. The possibility of not having separate identities does not do anything to the possibility of having separate identities.
You get to choose. Or your different identities get to choose.
@fraying And it is not necessarily binary. Book loving me and cake loving me and pro wrestling loving me might want to share an identity while activism me and anarco me might want to share a different identity.
@owen then, genuinely, why combine any of them? Why not just add bio links from one to another if you want them linked? What is gained from all the work and problematic potential outcomes here?
@fraying I am not sure what the ”problematic potential outcomes” are. My reason for allowing people to combine their fediverse identities, if they wanted to, would be to allow othe people to easily follow ”them” across the fediverse.
If I am owen.blab at this place and owen.blob at that place and owen.pix at Pixelfeed and owen.noise at somewhere else, and you want to follow ”me” then my bio links act as the start of a complex and error-prone process. If you can choose to follow @owen then you have a one-stop stop for following / unfollowing me. And the latter is often more important than the former.
It is one thing to follow someone in a brief flurry of enthusiam. It is a not so easy process to unfollow all of their many accounts.
@owen Honestly, meh. Who cares? Relationships form in context. Why follow everyone everywhere? Are we building software for stalkers? This is what I mean about this being tech solutionism.
@fraying i am not sure anyone want to follow anyone else everywhere. The question is how difficult we want to make finding people who want us to find them. Yes all relationships form and continue and end within contexts. So?
@owen so I don’t care about your accounts in other services if we have a relationship here. That’s the use case you mentioned earlier and I was just responding to it.
As for examples of identity context collapse, here’s a good recent one:
@fraying with respect the Glassdoor issue is about action without consent which is not what i thought we were talking about. That is not context collapse. That is absolute lack of care or respect.
You may fence our relationship as ”here” and that is totally fine. I may do the same. But some people may want to join some dots, and I feel that I should be able to let them, to the extent that I want them to.
You don’t want to join any dots? Good. We can happily talk here. They want to join dots? Good, they can challenge me on how my photos on Pixelfed relate to my writing here.
Who is wrong? Nobody. Is a technofix forcing one or the other onto the defensive? I don’t think so.
@owen yeah that’s a fair summary. And yeah of course the Glassdoor example is about many things, but the effect of their change was identity context collapse.
As with everything, there are good and bad ways to implement something. A single sign on type deal for the fediverse could be implemented carefully.
I just saw none of my concerns reflected in the article I linked to.
This is classic tech solutionism: thinking that code could do something so it should do it. Ignoring the social and community affordances in the name of convenience, as if creating an account was some kind of affront to your time and attention. And casually overlooking all the real cases of abuse and harassment that happen as a result of this kind of "connect everything, what could go wrong?" thinking.
@fraying So, having the option to use the same account for multiple purposes -- posting images and writing blog posts, for example -- is different from being forced to use the same account for everything.
Giving people the option to connect accounts means they can make their own decisions around what is combined and what is separate. Those lines aren't drawn by commercial apps; they're up to you. If you want to have one account for work, one for dating, and one for family, you choose.
@evan
See, this is why I suspect the people working on this aren’t talking to enough real people.
I don’t think you can say that maintaining different social graphs is not good for personal relationships or communities. In my experience, it’s not only good, it’s essential.
I think it’s part of the very definition of community to choose your identity and relationships in each context.
@fraying@evan I have multiple identities. I would like to use each of those identities in multiple places. That's the problem that it solves for me.
Distinct identity accounts per app is already solved.
But I'd like to use ID1 on e.g. Mastodon -and- Pixelfed -and- kbin, and I'd like to use ID-2 on those three apps. I'd prefer one account per identity, not one account per app per identity.
I want my separate identities, but I'd like each one to work on -all- ActivityPub platforms.
@jaz@evan And what is stopping you from being each identity in each place now? Nothing. So what you’re really talking about is single sign on. Convenience. I get that. But it’s seems like a pretty small inconvenience to me. Especially when accidental identity context collapse can be so damaging.
Different social graphs are important, healthy, and necessary.
But social graphs that break down purely on app boundaries puts your relationship with an app ahead of your relationship with humans.
The Web 2.0 world was focused around per-app communities and relationships. My Flickr network is different from my Upcoming network which is different from my Delicious network.
But that served the needs of Flickr, Upcoming, and Delicious, not the needs of my friends and family.
@evan I fully disagree! I have people in each of those places that were unique to those places! Why should someone who follows my goat pics on a photo site want to follow my political posts on a text site? Why should we assume they would? These are my needs, for my community, and they have nothing to do with the needs of the companies.
In fact, the companies would love nothing more than to shovel in content and connections from other places.
I respect you so much but you’ve got this backwards.
@fraying so, you've brought up a really good point, which is that one kind of community can emerge from the set of people who use a particular platform. That's a very important kind of community and I shouldn't have dismissed it as unimportant. Some of my most important experiences have been with that kind of community.
My bias here is that I’ve seen how horrible it can be for people who felt safe in a community when they get outed in another context. I just think that any shared identity systems need to be designed to protect from those kind of experiences from the outset.
@fraying@evan the thing is... you don't need to connect your identities if you don't want to. You can keep a political microblogging account on firefish or be part of a lemmy community, and have a pixelfed account somewhere with a different username and a different social circle and nobody needs to know you're the same person. It's about having more choices really, nobody can force you to use it.
@panos@evan yes, I get that. I’ve also seen many times how this info can leak out inadvertently. So the systems need to be designed to protect people from the outset.
@fraying I agree! I also would say that the kind of one-time permission structures we see in most OAuth implementations, or in app stores, aren't sufficient; people breeze past them and don't always think about consequences. I think that design work is really interesting!
I also see that account creation step as a very important part of the social community experience. That’s where rules should be introduced and community norms explained. I actually think the design of that step should force people to slow down and really consider what they’re doing.
@fraying But my extended family didn't meet on an online platform. Neither did my neighbours nor my coworkers. I think slicing up those kinds of relationships and groups based on what apps they have on their phones kind of sucks.
I have different subgroups of family on different services because that’s just where they had accounts.
But honestly I don’t see that as a problem. I just go where they are.
But you’re right - there’s a difference between real world relationships that migrate online, and digital communities that form online and sometimes migrate off.
@fraying secondarily, it's good for software developers building cool new stuff.
If you figure out a neat image processing system, and you want to let people share these socially, it sucks to have to start a social network from scratch. Social networking infrastructure is hard to build.
It's much better to concentrate on what you do well, and let people share to their own existing network.
@evan I get that, but I don’t care about making life easier for software developers. I think software developers’ job is to make things people want to use. Things that solve ordinary people’s problems, not software developer problems.
@fraying We all are used to this kind of segmentation with email addresses -- using your work email address for some contexts, and your personal email address for other contexts. Nobody makes you have a single email address for all contexts. Nobody is going to make you use a single fediverse account for all contexts.
@fraying it’s a harder design challenge to give people the tools to be clean but let them be messy if they want, and in addition to it being hard there’s a certain type of designer brain that hates that as a product goal. it’s easy to make something that is a mess or that squeezes everyone through a tiny hole, but neither is actually going to create something that a wide swath of people want to engage with, form a relationship with
@fraying yes and: it is annoying that I have a separate identity each for Mastodon and Pixelfed and I welcome any approaches to unify those. In reality, I’m not using Pixelfed as a result. But also because there are no goat pics there ;)
@janl Counterpoint: The account creation process is the establishment of a relationship between you and the community you’re joining. It’s the most effective moment for the community to clearly establish the rules of participation. I think the account creation process should be harder and more considered, not faster and easier.
@fraying I don’t even see this as a counterpoint. You are absolutely right. I’m just observing that what community is on here is not well-defined and possibly forever in flux. If Pixelfed is going to be “no Masto folks here please”, then that’s fine, but I haven’t seen that yet. :)
(Also this was a sneaky nudge to get MBF content onto Pixelfed 😘)
Anyway, I started this thread by wondering if any of the people working on the tech for this idea have talked to real people who would use it. The answer to that is either yes or no, but when you reply “I need it” the answer is probably no.
I suggest talking to some real users instead of trying to convince me.
Add comment