rogeriochaves/feedless

Multiple Devices?

Closed this issue · 4 comments

TBarretH commented

I know most other SSB clients don't like you logging in to the same identity across multiple devices. With Feedless, it is relatively easy to click the e-mail link on multiple different devices to access the same identity. Other SSB projects have noted that doing this can wind up breaking the identity. Is this a problem for feedless as well, or have you found a way to safely support multiple devices accessing the same identity?

utunga commented

Since there's a single copy of your feed itself - stored on the server, rather than on a local device - you can update the feed from multiple browsers and not have that broken feed problem. The key is kept locally so only you can update the feed (or rather only someone with access to that all important 'login button' email) but interleaving updates are not such a problem.

If there were multiple feedless servers running and you updated your feed at different servers on different occasions you might have a problem - but since there are not, it's not such a problem.

TBarretH commented

Interesting. What is the advantage of using SSB if you're still using a server architecture to store the feed? I thought the whole point of SSB was to be fully Peer to Peer with no sever to interact with. If you're storing all the feeds on a server why not use a more traditional server/client architecture?

utunga commented

I didn't write feedless so I really couldn't say. But a couple of things occur to me...

  1. The private key stays with you so you still have the power - at least in theory - to move to from a hosted (on feedless) feed to a fully private feed using a peer to peer to client - and (importantly) you have the ability to do that without asking permission from feedless, i think

  2. The dream is to move to fully peer-to-peer but browser based and I believe that other projects are working on that just as one example https://github.com/sunrise-choir or https://www.npmjs.com/package/ssb-browser-core so i guess maybe this is just a step along the way to that desireable future so its more of a proof of concept of the idea in terms of the end user experience / social side of things, for now..

  3. One of the biggest problems with ssb is the 'onboarding' process - its really hard to get started.. so maybe (i dunno but maybe) it makes sense to have something like feedless where its drop dead simple to get started but then once you have your identity and know how it works then maybe you wanna take your identity with you and move to a different client where you have more autonomy and control etc.. assuming you care... I'm not sure what the process is to import an existing key into https://manyver.se or https://planetary.social or other clients, though, so while possible in theory not sure how realistic in practice at the moment.

TBarretH commented

That all makes sense. I agree that onboarding with SSB is pretty problematic, and not being able to use the same account across multiple devices I think is also going to be a huge limitation to adoption. So for now the server model helps with those things for sure. Eventually it'd be great to get to a fully peer to peer model but in a browser that can be accessed from different devices. Beyond the ability to control your data you get as a user, the advantage to the creator of not having to host a server and scale it with user count when going peer to peer is great.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments.