Discussion
If you use Pixelfed's "Sign in with Mastodon" feature, it does not actually sign you in with Mastodon.
What it does do is create a totally new Pixelfed account every time you use this feature, and copies over info from your Mastodon account. You end up with two separate unconnected accounts, your original one on Mastodon and a new one on Pixelfed.
It might be better to call this feature "Create a new Pixelfed account by copying your profile from Mastodon".
I don't know OAuth, and never use "sign in with Google", so perhaps my question is super basic. But here's the scenario:
- I go to Pixelfed a few times, and post a few pictures, using my pre-existing Mastodon account each time.
- I think "hmm, I think I posted an image I wish I hadn't". I want to go see everything I've posted, and possibly remove one of them.
(continued) ....
1/X
To my thinking, these are all my posts, and they are all "owned" by me, so I should be able to do this, and it should be pretty basic.
Can I do this? And is it straightforward?
There is no way to link accounts across servers, because all the servers are deliberately independent (some reasons why: https://fedi.tips/why-is-the-fediverse-on-so-many-separate-servers ).
If you want to sign in on a server, you need to use the account you got from that server.
You can't use your Mastodon account on Pixelfed, all you can do is make a Pixelfed account that has copied info from your Mastodon account.
So when I go to the Pixelfed server and sign in, I'm only in my Pixelfed account, (which was set-up as a copy of my Mastodon account, but isn't "live-linked" to it?), and not in my Mastodon account?
But within that Pixelfed account I can see *all* the posts I made, and can edit them at will?
If that's the case, then I'm okay with that. I think the explanation is that I don't expect to have a unified identity across the Internet, unlike (apparently) many others?
Yeah, when you sign in on a server it is just the account from that server.
There is no live link of any kind, every server is totally independent.
You can only see/edit your Pixelfed posts in your Pixelfed account. You can only see/edit your Mastodon posts in your Mastodon account.
You can follow and interact with both kinds of account from both kinds of account, and follow and interact with accounts from all kinds of servers, but all the accounts are separate.
@FediTips I belong to the ieji.de instance for the Twitter-like part, pixel.tchncs.de for the Insta-like part, and spectra.video for the YouTube-like part of the greater Fediverse.
Of course, I use different accounts.
Of course, I have blocked the mastodon.social instance because, erroneously, they believe that Mastodon is something that exists and that it belongs to them. No.
We have all joined the greater Fediverse to escape such notions of centralised entities.
@FediTips It doesn't create a new account every time, it just allows you to use Mastodon oAuth to create or sign in to Pixelfed.
This is pretty typical of how oAuth SSO works.
Hey Dansup, thanks for taking the time to respond!
The problem is that SSOs are almost all used for centralised services, so no one is expecting to be able to communicate between e.g. Strava and Netflix etc.
On the Fediverse people ARE expecting to communicate across instances and services, so they expect a sign in to mean that they are using their existing account with their existing social graph.
If it was labelled "Create an account" it would avoid confusion?
p.s. AFAIK it does create a new account every time, at least if you use it on multiple instances.
People think they have one Mastodon account and that they can interact with Pixelfed servers by signing in with it, and the "sign in with Mastodon" link implies this.
But when they actually use the link, it doesn't allow them to communicate from Mastodon to the Pixelfed server, it creates a new account that they didn't ask for that has no connection to the Mastodon account.
It doesn't create a new account every time, it just allows you to use Mastodon oAuth to create or sign in to Pixelfed.
Uffz.
Honestly, first I was reading
Every single time? I really do hope someone has filed Issue on the git repo..
And thought it was an issue about pixelfed...
this is interesting. The button does exactly what I would expect it to. I never considered people might expect that other behaviour. I guess it's another lesson, when designing UI, to remember that people can see the world very differently!
Ok. A social view point...
But
It doesn't create a new account every time, it just allows you to use Mastodon oAuth to create or sign in to Pixelfed.This is pretty typical of how oAuth SSO works.
It's just OAuth. This is very common and OAuth Buttons often are called "Sign in"or "Sign Up".
Looking at my page I see a lot of "Sign up with...", "Sign in with..." and "Login with..." buttons.
Maybe we should label those buttoins e.g. "Sign ijn with OAuth" and teach the audience better about the protocols like fediverse and OAuth?
@FediTips one day in a certain version of the world, this could actually be true — I have an unrecorded talk on Alternative Architectures for ActivityPub, and in it I show how that could be possible, but certain folks hate it because it's too "AT Protocol"
@FediTips
Maybe it was a typo?
This could very easily have been "Sign up with Mastodon."
@FediTips mención obligatoria a @andrewblasco xD
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services Every single time? I really do hope someone has filed Issue on the git repo.. 😬
p.s. Just to make clear, I'm not trying to criticise Pixelfed or this feature! 🙂
I'm just trying to inform people because the name of the feature doesn't quite match what it does, and I've regularly had to help people confused by the name.
@FediTips this is interesting. The button does exactly what I would expect it to. I never considered people might expect that other behaviour. I guess it's another lesson, when designing UI, to remember that people can see the world very differently!
@FediTips Just call it "Register with Mastodon" instead of Sign In
@splitmind
This isn't any kind of sneaky/deceptive thing that Pixelfed is doing. It's an absolutely standard implementation of a standardized protocol for single sign-in and it works exactly the same as any site that has a "Sign in with" button for Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, or whatever.
@FediTips
It doesn't make any sense to use SSO terms like this on a federated network, because the entire point is the instances are supposed to be talking to each other instead of being totally separate services.
"Signing in" and getting a totally new, totally blank account every single time is just confusing. It isn't signing in, it's creating a new account.
@FediTips
Identity isn't decentralized in ActivityPub, though. It's still internalized to the instance that hosts it. They misperception of SSO that is being espoused here isn't expected of any other Fediverse platforms, so why is it being demanded from Pixelfed? You should be blaming the stewards of the ActivityPub standard for not separating identity into federated service unto it's own.
@splitmind
@FediTips Part of the problem is how Pixelfed is designed to feel like something completely seperate. it hides posts without images and names the button that way because it wants to appear like Instagram instead of being part of the Fediverse.
There's a post that was written about this before:
https://ploum.net/2025-12-04-pixelfed-against-fediverse.html
@FediTips I know I shouldn’t, but I keep getting surprised by the levels of bad faith in the pixelfed design.
@baronvonj @rimu @sjoerd @FediTips for sure, it's a very good idea to mimick Google dark patterns in open source projects. /s
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