For the longest time, I've been wanting to set up an email server with one of its main purposes being phone notifications.
Is there a fedi thing that I can use to do that?
You know how many server apps will ask for an email address?
Heck even immich asked for an email address! WTF! Ask me for my mastodon or my Lemmy address! So far these have been very reliable communication systems.
I guess the question is also a sort of statement. Why not add a fedi option for logins? Please???
Looks like they hacked something already for this using:
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/discussions/12842
It looks intimidating but probably same as spooling up a mastodon instance.
Most people have one or more email addresses (the OG federated messaging system) and email notifications pretty much "just work". Compared to email usage, Fediverse users are a rounding error.
Okay but why not add the option. I'm going to request it on immich!
Develop and maintain it.
Then you can open a pull request.
Development time and user support?
These are two pretty obvious reasons. It takes time and time is a limited resource. Therefore, time should be spent on solving impactful problems. Lemmy account login is extremely low impact, it's not a bad thing, it's just not something that improves immich for a large portion of its user base.
Another thing is user support. Since the many instances are self-hosted for the most part, and they will go offline, and they will go away forever in some instances. Users asking for support for this login type and asking for additional features to make up for this baked in instability.
Essentially. Low impact work that may drive a higher volume of support efforts.
It's the same reason some niche projects stop supporting Linux. Low user volume and disproportionately high "neediness" of those users.
Because less than 1% of users would use it and your trusting the security of not one bit partner but thousands of ever-changing small partners.
Also, email is already federated.
The security of one big partner is bonkers. Anyone working for that company can divulge your personal data to anyone who has enough influence, money or power to do so. Having thousands of literally individual Linux installations is what makes Linux safe-er for example.
If you want to host your own email server, then do that. As someone earlier in the thread said, email was the first federated messaging system. That was the entire point of SMTP. Anyone could host one and trust it would work.
I don't know if it's what you're looking for, as it's not ActivityPub based, but Postmoogle is a Matrix bridge email server, where you can send emails to it and they'll be converted to Matrix messages. There might be a similar thing for ActivityPub?
There were old wrappers that emulated sendmail but reformatted the message for use with gotify and such