[Dalewyn]

And I've used precisely none of them.

Why would I deliberately tie multiple logins to one credential, which may or may not go out of my control for any or no reason whatsoever? I'm not even talking about Google specifically here, I'm talking in general terms.

The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.

If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?

[jochem9]

> The more I hear about the federated multiverse, the more I see it as just another centralization abstraction layer on the decentralized network that is the internet.

> If we want decentralization, why can't we just use the internet like ye olde days?

I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion. The internet is indeed already decentralized, yet connected, allowing you to traverse networks to reach resources that are more often than not outside your 'home' network.

Federated social media is exactly that, but for posting and interacting with content. Its killer feature is that you don't have to create an account everywhere, but are able to interact from your home instance with any other instance in the network. Exactly like the internet.

If we'd go back to ye olde days, it would be like pre-internet from a network perspective. Having to log in physically on a specific network to access its resources. Or when talking about the internet until ~2008 (and to some extent still true): creating a separate account for every forum you'd want to participate in.

[Barrin92]

convenience is the obvious one, normal people don't enjoy handling 50 different accounts. The less obvious but arguably more important one is safety. In ye olde days and still today random sites generally don't really know what they're doing and with OAuth you're not leaking your data to some server in a basement that get's pwned every few weeks. If you use Google or an equivalent service to login you retain control over your credentials.

[syslog]

And then Google decides for no discernable reason to lock your account, making it impossible to login _anywhere_.

I get the convenience and also the security benefits, but there‘s a whole lot of risk, too.