We all know that the EU wants age verification for the web. I dont trust my country, the EU and definitely not Instagram, Twitter etc. to implement this in way where my personal data won’t be shared with anyone. But the idea that everyone on social media is a verified human beeing could also have a lot of positive effects.
Imo it would be awesome if every person could have only one single account. Bans and restrictions have much more impact which forces users to behave more like irl. You could reduce a massive amount of bots which would reduce fake news and be a time saver for mods.
As a solution for the privacy issue, I searched for open source passport verification tools and found ZKPassport which makes the proof on you own device without sending you data anywhere. It generates a deterministic Id which is salted and hashed, so you can’t find a real person from a user account or otherwise. Only this Id is sent to the server as a proof, nothing else. The code is open source and its possible to self host the backend for this system.
I try to implement ZKPassport into a lemmy fork to make a small proof of concept for this idea. Of course this needs a lot more security features for a real production scenario, because mods and server owners have much more power and the federation is more complicated with only a few servers that have passport auth enabled and some even have their own implementation of the auth.
So if the proof of concept works out well the question is, would people be rather use passport authenticated Fediverse instances when all of you data stays on your phone?
EDIT: I don’t suggest that the whole fediverse switches to passport authentication, every instance can decide on their own. Therefore you could also have multiple accounts across multiple instances but not multiple accounts on the same instance.
Passport verification is a terrible idea. Instead of passport verification, the fediverse really lacks separating auth servers into a separate SSO component. So that you could log in to every fedi instance with the same account. It would be super convenient, and those who like to keep everything close together could just run two components side by side.
Centralizing authentication means someone gets to control access to the whole fediverse, which would be pretty fucking awful if anyone like .ml team was running authentication and had the power to easily deny anyone whose opinions they didn’t like.
SSO doesn’t work like that. Conventionally, there is an sso ml provider, an sso world provider, and anyone else from the fediverse. Any server, for example lemmy, looks at the login domain during authorization and sends a request to the server along the lines of “someone is trying to log in, send the cookies and a redirect link”; someone is redirected to the SSO server, authenticates there, and then returns back to the original lemmy node. The registration endpoint can be determined by the domain.
Like, for example, lemmy.world login 1234@lemmy.ml -> redirect to lemmy.ml for password -> redirect to lemmy.world back. Or any another instance in fediverse.
Accordingly, this is literally no different from what exists now except for one nuance — I won’t need to go to my instance anymore, find a post mirrored from world, and write a comment there. I will simply be able to log in directly on world and write whatever I want.
And passwords are in the hands of the node admins anyway. This will literally differ from the current scheme in nothing except that potentially the owner of your lemmy account could hijack your mastodon. But those who actually think about this will just make 2 SSO accounts. But how easy that will be. No 20 accounts in 20 instances… And no one will have to explain why they need 20 accounts at all. And I’ll finally be able to watch pirtube, read lemmy, and comment on mastodon from the same username. =)
UPD: Especially tough guys will just be able to host their SSO node and not bother with password hijack.