[cemerick]

Portable identities as a feature is definitely being worked on, but IIRC it will only help in the "I need to move from one instance to another" case. I don't have a project issue number handy, but it's there.

Multiple identities seems like a problem best solved by client-side tools (e.g. tweetdeck handles this usage really well IME).

[x1798DE]

> Multiple identities seems like a problem best solved by client-side tools (e.g. tweetdeck handles this usage really well IME).

I agree in the sense that I might want something like a role / brand identity and a personal identity, but I was considering something more like instance-specific aliases or identities. The first-pass solution at this would be one where you can specify that different accounts on different instances are all the same person so that posts duplicated on multiple instances (i.e. in the local feed of that instance) can be de-duplicated in a federated feed that includes more than one of the aliases.

External clients won't be able to stop people from following one of the alias instances and not the "canonical" instance, and they won't be able to make servers de-duplicate content that is cross-posted to multiple instances. If this isn't addressed in the protocol, you'll get people hacking together "boost bots" that duplicate your identity to multiple instances (with the issues that comes from hacking something like that into your client) in the same way that they are already using "follow bots" that just randomly follow tons of users on other instances to force more thorough federation between instances.

[WorldMaker]

The easiest way to merge multiple toots originating from the same person (through multiple federated accounts) is not to need to merge them in the first place.

Admittedly, the current intent is that you (person) keep individual toots to specific instances and don't "cross-post", but there may be all sorts of reasons to need to cross-post across identities but try to avoid spamming federated friends.

Email doesn't need to solve the problem because there isn't a "public feed" to try to hit. The issue here is that the individual feeds in an instance are always going to be complicated game to play to get attention and the next steps are going to be instance-feed-optimization (IFO?) techniques including mass cross-posts, whether the Mastodon community wants to see that or not. (Just as advertisers still care to optimize how they show up on the Twitter public feed...)

Portable cross-instance identities are a possible way to mitigate some of the worst of that. My pessimism/cynicism thinks that maybe Mastodon instances shouldn't have instance and federated feeds publically visible. If I were to run my own instance, that would be the first things I'd disable.

[thejohnhenry]

https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

Although core devs don't seem to be interested in implementing this, as it's not supported in the Ostatus spec.