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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

> I had absolutely no issues with hosting my own mastodon

Just Mastodon - it's not what I'm talking about. Please let me know if my parent comment wasn't clear enough.

Mastodon certainly works and you can be just @aj (as long as no one else with the same host-local part walks in, I guess) no matter where the actual conversation is hosted. But what about Lemmy, Peertube, or other Fediverse systems? I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny. And then you need a different subdomain. And then you realize you're splitting your identity on the same network in two - and in my opinion that's an indicator that something is wrong.

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>I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny.

This is partially true. I run Pleroma, which is a microblogging server like Mastodon, so Mastodon content that federates to my instance shows up identically to my own posts. On a system like Lemmy, when their posts federate to me, what I see natively on my instance is a person posting a link that links to the originating website. I can see some replies inline, but they're linear and not threaded like on Lemmy. However, unlike what you said, still using my @me@my.domain identity, I can click the link from my instance to the Lemmy instance and interact with the content there natively. No need to create a different subdomain. There's no need to host a Lemmy instance yourself if you want to interact with Lemmy instances. Lemmy on the backend is still talking the ActivityPub protocol and it's only the frontend that alters how the posts are presented, so as long as your server speaks ActivityPub, you can use the same identity.

Are you saying that the primary issue is that for each federated service we need a separate account / instance for it as opposed to email which is just one email account? I don't disagree with that but it's the same situation for Reddit, YouTube, Twitter. I have to maintain separate accounts on those platforms too.

Yes. And I get it that we all have separate accounts. The difference is they're entirely separate networks, not one. If I'm on Fediverse, and self-hosting, with my own domain, it's fairly natural to want to have a solid identity, isn't it?

Which is where it's different to email. When self-hosting mail, you can have separate identities too, but those will be created on a purpose (different addresses for different personas/purposes), rather than fragmented because of necessity.

But you don't have separate identities for Youtube, Gmail, Meet et.c. For a federated internet, you should have the same ID for all federated services so that you can build the same product experience as with Apple or Microsoft or Google.

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