Mastodon can work as an oAuth Provider, I believe.
But the interest thing is that I'd like to do the opposite: I'd like to be able to use my own id (openID, public key, DNS record, whatever) and use it as my identity on any activitypub server. Then the servers would be truly a simple hosting provider.
Couldn't mastodon just provide an option to logging in via OpenID? Then you would have a single authentication for multiple mastodon instances with different topics.
Is there a way with Mastodon to have an account on a hosted server but use an ID from a domain you control? Like if I wanted to have my ID be @me@social.apitman.com but pay for an account on another server rather than have my own.
Seems like it should be possible with Let's Encrypt.
I have a domain, and I want my identity to be tied to my domain, regardless of which mastadon server I’m using. I don’t want someone else in control of my identity. I don’t want to lose my followers.
It’d be ideal if Mastadon supported something like IndieAuth. That way I could control my identity while also using the same identity across mastodon servers.
So as I understand it, Mastodon is a Ruby on Rails web server that speaks to other instances using the ActivityPub protocol in a technical sense.
You register with a given Mastodon instance which speaks ActivityPub to other servers which may or may not be Mastodon instances as well.
Now your home Mastodon instance also serves a React frontend which is technically acting as an OAuth2 client that speaks to the backend via REST APIs, compared to say: Server-side rendered HTML
Similarly, mobile apps connecting to your preferred instance are also OAuth2 clients.
In that sense, you can use a different frontend to speak directly to the REST APIs offered by your Mastodon instance of choice.
This all being one level above ActivityPub itself of course.
What are you talking about? You don't need to host your own Mastodon server. You can sign up with one of the many open instances, just like gmail and hotmail let you do for e-mail.
Anyone (or any organization) can self-host their own open source mastodon instance. The way it scales is the same way there are billions of email accounts - federation and an open protocol.
I'm not familiar with Mastodon, but this is the generic mechanism for linking identity since the earliest web days; as long as names are hard to spoof it's independent of any specific service.
Activitypub which, mastodon is based on, requires active cryptographic signature of everything. It's why there will probably never be a truly minimalistic mastodon client and they'll all be bloated javascript (or otherwise) applications and not minimalistic HTML elements doing POSTs/etc. This choice has made it irreducibly complex and heavy.
At least mastodon is built on top of an open protocol. Those discussion already took place for ActivityPub, mastodon just implemented the open standard. You just came with a random idea and absolutely nothing but an organization on GitHub.
I run my own instance in a convoluted way - I added ActivityPub source and sink support to my own webapp. But every user deserves account portability, not just those who know how to deploy and maintain a Mastodon instance.
Mastodon requires more than simply ActivityPub to be able to interact with it. Its user discovery is based on WebFinger and if you don't have that working, your service won't be able to be interact with Mastodon servers.
If you want to be on your own sovereign island you can host your own Mastodon instance or pay a monthly fee to one of the many Managed Mastodon providers and even use your own domain name.
It is not that much different from choosing an email provider.
I'm not sure I even follow this argument. I can stand up a single host in an hour or two. Six months from now, there will probably be 30 competing providers who can do it at the push of a button. Respectfully: why is it relevant to me what Mastodon was "made for"? I just want to follow people and post stuff. That works just fine even if literally everyone has to run their own server.
ActivityPub is like RSS and Google Reader rolled up in Twitter's UX. That's what I'm psyched for, and the part of it that I think will catch on.
There is at least one[0] company providing mastodon hosting as a service. There really should be more though. The more Mastodon becomes compliant with Activity Pub, the more you could potentially replace all social media with it. Then both email and social media would be properly federated.
I agree that the Jones' wouldn't want to be hosted by the Smith's instance. But I can forsee something like a local co-op managing an instance for all neighbors. But personally, I'd rather just pay a company that I know is subject to various laws and consumer agreements, etc.
But the interest thing is that I'd like to do the opposite: I'd like to be able to use my own id (openID, public key, DNS record, whatever) and use it as my identity on any activitypub server. Then the servers would be truly a simple hosting provider.
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