Right now, your Lemmy account and all your content are tied to one server. Moving instances or having one shut down means losing your digital presence. Frankly, the server controls your online identity.

But what if you controlled your identity?

I've opened a discussion on the Lemmy dev GitHub about integrating Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). Think of a DID as a permanent, global ID you own, independent of any server.

Why DIDs are a game-changer for Lemmy:

Real Account Portability: Move your entire account – posts, comments, followers – to any new instance seamlessly. Your identity travels with you.
More User Control: Your online presence becomes resilient, managed by an ID you control, not governed by a single server's policies.
Proven Tech: It works. Protocols like ATProto (Bluesky) successfully use DIDs for portable user identities.
Full Fediverse Compatibility: We can add DIDs to Lemmy while staying fully interoperable with Mastodon, Kbin, and all other ActivityPub platforms. No breaking changes, just a powerful upgrade.

This is a big step towards a more decentralized and user-controlled fediverse. If you're interested in more control over your digital self, check out the discussion:

[GitHub Issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5942]

If you're on other ActivityPub platforms, consider pushing for similar solutions! The more platforms that adopt truly portable identity, the stronger the fediverse becomes.

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[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

https://joinfediverse.wiki/Nomadic_identity

As far as I can tell Hubzilla seems to do it by having alts on different instances and then having a way to associate them with each other, so every instance knows that all the alts they're the same user. It's a bit clunky but it avoids as many fundamental changes to ActivityPub because most things under the hood are the same as without nomadic identity and the UI just treats several actors as the same user.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's essentially how ATProto does it and they publish other instance actors under "also known as" in the did. that's essentially what im proposing.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I like how the did field is in addition to the existing actor field, providing a way to gradually transition the protocol to the new way.

[–] muntedcrocodile@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Yeah that's critical without it everything would break