I apologize if I'm coming across as paternalistic, but it really isn't a matter of simply choosing privacy vs. not privacy. There are some real technical and even conceptual barriers to this, due to the decentralized nature of things. There simply is no central state. If you want any sort of communication between domains and websites, then it's not as simple as "oh yeah we can just add that". Standards need to be developed, problems need to be thought out, etc etc.

The "log in with Google" functionality is not really the same here, because you are creating accounts on those websites internally and just linking the two. The websites in that case just need to know who you are. It's not like you're giving them permission to send emails on your behalf, does that make sense?

With the fediverse, you very explicitly don't create accounts on every single website because that would mean making thousands of different accounts. What you would need is a way to authorize certain actions. I'm not opposed to this, personally, but even in the best of cases it would still be 2 or 3 steps. Step 1 is letting the remote website know who you are -- by clicking a button somewhere and typing in your domain name or profile URL. We've already violated the "1-click" expectation before we even get to the permission request. So the best we can do is something like this:

Click "follow" on the remote domain
Enter your profile URL or domain
A pop-up or modal or new page asks if you trust the remote domain. You click "Authorize" to allow the remote website to act on your behalf. The follow goes through.

If you only had one account, then perhaps some browser plugin would let you automate this -- give the plugin your profile URL or domain, and it will autofill (2) for you. But mutliple different projects need to agree on a technical specification for this (OAuth against the Mastodon API, IndieAuth + Micropub, etc). It's not just Mastodon being unwilling to do this for "self-imposed" reasons.

Uh oh!

1 click follow #19954

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