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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Ludrol@szmer.info 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It will probably need it's own RFC but let's hear from the devs if they want to do it. (In my experience it's hard to push through the desired change)

You will have better time trying to implement this in piefed

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

IMO nomadic identity is more important in Mastodon, etc where the fundamental connections of the network are person-to-person - the emphasis is on following other people and having them follow you and that is what determines what content you see. Also being free to leave (and go somewhere else) is a killer feature that centralized social networks cannot offer and nomadic identity really leans into that strength.

In contrast, in the threadiverse you can't follow other people - you join communities. Also when a post is viewed the author is just another piece of meta data, the focus is really on the content. With Mastodon they make a much bigger deal about who is saying the thing, display their avatar much bigger, etc. On Mastodon they're YOUR posts that are strongly tied to you. But here, the posts you make are kiinda more like contributions to a shared wiki (community).

So in PieFed/Lemmy if you need to drop your account on an instance and create a new account on another it's really much less of a loss and not really disruptive at all. You can just import your settings from the old account and continue to post in all the same communities you did before. The need for a nomadic identity just isn't as strong.

Moving communities to another instance, tho, now that would be great. It's on my very long list.

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

Due to how the fediverse works if users can be given a did so can a community. It would only migrate for services that support did but wouldn't be all to different.

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

Yep good point. A group is just another type of actor, after all.