@dansup more of a follow up question…

Are such semi-centralising hubs inevitable as tools for smoothing over the UX issues of decentralisation?

I’m personally betting yes.

@dansup Wouldn't that then be a single point of failure?

Unless, I guess, you're using something like SOLID data pods.

@dansup Would be a good idea, but the feature should be toggleable for admins if they don't want that for some reason and the user should be encouraged to remember his/her login details.

@dansup Why not just remind the user of their instance instead of logging them in ?
Because ease of use I guess but it would lift some burden I guess (centralisation, account protection, ...).

@dansup I think it sounds awesome! If I were doing it, I would build it as a FedCM service. It unfortunately isn't broadly supported yet, but I would still build with it in mind so that I can easily transition later :)

https://github.com/fedidcg/FedCM/blob/main/explainer.md

@dansup I'd like a hub that has links to all my other fedi apps so people can find me across the -verse.

@dansup imho this would be helpful across the fediverse, not just on a per service basis: one central account that can be used to login to many services.

That, of course, means placing a huge amount of trust in whoever runs that federated AAA service. Is there a pre-existing open source equivalent to “login with google/apple/Facebook/etc.”?

@dansup Would that be something like a pixelfed-specific SSO? Could be cool for the fediverse as a whole, but might be a massive undertaking.

@dansup Sounds... way overly centralized IMO.

@dansup This is almost what I was hoping for. I'd suggest though making the auth hub it's own identity/service so that it could more easily be stood up by site builders who are looking for SSO to multiple services on the same domain, ie: I'd like to sso pixelfed.domain.tld/firefish.domain.tld/friendica.domain.tld and have something like passport.domain.tld

Ideally the account itself should be portable to another auth instance as well, say someone is going offline.

@dansup

All complications and misunderstandings start with Passport-like services...