Do I really need one account per service?
I thought one of the advantages of the Fediverse was to have one account but access to many services. Is this possible just not common? I already have a Lemmy account and Mastodon and I didn't want to start making more just to try out the other services.
It's not federated identity, it's federated content.
Your instance can in theory access all the content including Mastodon, but there's some software incompatibilities preventing that from quite working right because the way Lemmy does things is quite different than how Mastodon and other microblogging services do.
i use mbin specifically so i can do both with one account. i can follow (and be followed) and post to mastodon as well as interact with all of lemmy.
lemmy doesnt allow following at all.
shoutout https://moist.catsweat.com
Every time I see that URL, I wince
Its like pineapple on pizza.. people either love it or hate it. there is no in between
Same here. It still has the limitation of being instance-based though, so if you decide to move to another server or our existing instance shuts down, you can't take your account stuff with you (like when I had to move from Kbin and "lost" the first few months). Which may never be possible given the design of federation. I recall the question came up pretty early when people were concerned about picking the "right" instance without any knowledge of anything, and some were throwing around ideas of a way to pass along user history from one account to another...but I don't know the state of that.
I thought one of the advantages of the Fediverse was to have one account but access to many services. Is this possible just not common?
It's a misunderstanding by you. It's not that you have one account on one website and can login on all the others with it. Rather, you can look at content and interact with users from other websites from your home one.
Like, it's really a lot like Email. If you're signed up with Gmail, you can freely send emails to users signed up with other email providers. But you can't just go to Outlook's online version and log in with your Gmail account. The same applies to the fediverse.
That said, if your goal is to interact with the rest of the fediverse, you're probably better off switching to Mbin. Lemmy doesn't really care about anything that's not a Reddit-like.
It is how it should work though. Outlook could absolutely make a ‘log in with Gmail’ button. And the fediverse UX should be seamless to compete not this fragmented mess it is currently.
There's definitely still a bunch of areas the fediverse could be improved in, yeah.
Oh no, the email comparison.
Lemmy mostly federates with Lemmy, but everything else out there (PeerTube, PixelFed, etc) has been developed to work well with Mastodon (sometimes to the Fediverse's detriment), so your Mastodon account should be all you need.
Lemmy
And Mbin and Piefed!
From other replies it sounds like this isn't guaranteed. I tried logging into pixelfed using my Mastodon info and it didn't work (stopped me as soon as I gave the instance).
Hubzilla allows for a "nomadic identity" and some services allow you to log in using other services - !neodb@lemmy.zip has a long list of logins it allows (not Lemmy... yet).
It's not possible with the current approach of server-centric ActivityPub software. In theory, you can have one ActivityPub account to interact with all the other services, but in practice what happens is that the different server creates a new one internally and does not give you access to the private key.
It depends on whether the services are compatible. They don't all implement activitypub quite the same way.
You can try pasting something into the Lemmy search field (a Mastodon user, pixelfed feed, etc.) and see what comes up. But it may take a minute to federate the first time.
No. The Fediverse is access to syndicated content from a single website. Signing up at some other rando's website is not going to give you any privileges on mine, and my account on my server doesn't let me log into any of your computers.
The fediverse isn't a handful of commercial services for you to demand access to. It's a shit ton of small websites run by random individuals for niche communities, and a small number of large websites run by people with an impulsive drive toward self-punishment.
In reality, no, in practice, yes.
It is possible for someone to make a service which has an interface for each type of activitypub interaction. Mbin has microblogging and lemmy stuff on one account which is nice.
But in practice, different services do different things. Again, though, nothing stopping someone from making an all-in-one
But like I have one account for YouTube Gmail and Google+, Ha remember when that was a thing, so could someone make a single sign in for all those services? One sign in for Lemmy, peertube, pixelfed, etc...
Somebody could. Mbin is probably the closest thing you have rn
Common misconception by Fediverse newbies: "Fediverse" is an umbrella term for a bunch of decentralised walled gardens. Like, Lemmy only connects to Lemmy, Mastodon only connects to Mastodon, Pixelfed only connects to Pixelfed etc. And if you're on Mastodon, and your Facebook friends join Friendica, you need a Friendica account to get back in touch with them.
In reality, just about everything is interconnected with everything. No matter what it is.
You can use your Mastodon account to follow people on Pixelfed, on Friendica, on Misskey, whatever.
That said, having a separate Lemmy account makes sense because Lemmy/the Threadiverse is somewhat special in operation. Also, it's all about conversations and groups, and Mastodon doesn't understand neither. And starting a thread on Lemmy from Mastodon is not as straight-forward as starting a thread on Mastodon from Mastodon.