Convener: Anca

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Andy Piper (@andypiper@macaw.social)
• Ruud (@ruud@mastodon.world and many more…) 😆️
• Jon (@jdp23@blahaj.zone and also many more)
• nigini (@nigini@social.coop)
• Ryan Barrett (@snarfed.org@snarfed.org)
• Lisa Dusseault

Notes

How many fedi identities do you have?

• Jon: well over a dozen plus a few more for testing. A few I don’t want to be found, most I do.
• Anca: 5 right now that I actively use.
• Ruud: @ruud@mastodon.world) was my initial account but soon became the ‘admin’ account. It now has 11k followers who don’t want to follow Ruud but follow the admin. So I created @ruud@ruud.social) as personal account. I also run around 12 other instances where I have accounts.
• Andy: 16 at current count, but most of them don’t show on the pipesring app thing.

What do you do to manage them?

• Jon: I use multi-accounts clients like Phnapy somewhat, but mostly I just tough it out with multiple tabs in a couple different browsers.
• nigini: +1 to Phanpy! I also sometimes use an account to test new clients for some time. How many active email addresses do you have?
• People comment that with emails, they can redirect these to their “main” address.

Do you want to be found?

• Andy points out that these many accounts match the “old social media” view about having a Twitter, FB, Insta, accounts etc. I’m feeling more confident now with these different identities, and telling people where to follow me for what topics. Here’s Andy’s webfinger-based aggregator: https://pipesring.glitch.me/
• Ruud: I have a lot of accounts, created some for my hobbies, but now i’m pulling back from that. I’d rather just have one account that people could follow me for any of my interests. It’s too much to handle right now - lots of platforms and no app that lets me use all of them.
• Jon: Fediverse is great at supporting multiple identities, but we don’t have good tooling for things like merging streams, boosting from the correct identity.

We also don’t have good tooling or even protocol support for using a single account! You’re limited to the functionality, post types, interaction and activity types, etc that your server understands, and no server software understands all of them. Most only understand a small subset, eg microblogging.

Cool concept: Nomadic Identity

• Nigini: I’m concerned about the number of handles and identities that stay on servers aftter I leave. Can people reuse those?
• If people switch handles, do they ask people to follow them once again?
• We’d love to have all the options to move accounts and change names, and move accounts and not change names, and to not move accounts and yet change names. These are all interesting use cases
• Some accounts are useful for cachet/fame
• Having multiple accounts just in order to have multiple names, whether for cachet or historic purposes, does create confusion both for the person with several accounts (What’s going on where) and for others.
• Damon mentions “Activity Pods” (https://activitypods.org/) Also look at Hubzilla. Nostr protocol also has some ways to manage this
• SOLID pods can be a solution to this allowing multiple accounts to be hosted from one pod, your multiple inboxes can go to one pod.
• Is the concept of ActivityPods (https://activitypods.org/) cloning of the content in your server? or is it more like a one-person mastodon server? You set up a server. An identity attached to a pod, and the pod has all the ACLs. so if you allow access to an app that can serve your ActivityPub content, the MastoPod client, you get the information in that way.

Tools for letting people see the list of identities:

• Linktr.ee
• Glitch Bios (Andy)

Nigini made a pitch for having interesting discussions about server size; when is a server too big to successfully moderate… would one-person “pods” or helping small-communities to host their own servers, be benefitial for the federation health by decentralized the governance and load that is now going to larger servers.

Use cases:

• Publising - Logging into different systems to publish certain content. There are tools to help w/ this, but the activity of publishing is very differnt from the other use cases.
• Consuming a feed - Reading stuff that might be interesting and engaging.
• Responding to others - The inbox, where you can see which identity received the interaction and lets you respond.

These can exist in different apps, different modes.

• @snarfed: Fediverse is very collectivist, culturally and technically. Sometimes that’s not the best way, especially when it comes to supporting different content types (e.g. events vs. notes)
• Referencing micro.blog - this allows people to sign up w/ a domain and helps get set up DNS.

Question: How many of the single-posting services use the Mastodon API? Yes, many of them do.