What’s In a (User)Name

• About
• Latest Posts

Todd Weaver

Founder and CEO
PGP Fingerprint: B8CA ACEA D949 30F1 23C4 642C 23CF 2E3D 2545 14F7

Latest posts by Todd Weaver (see all)

• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 14: Surveillance Capitalism - April 23, 2024
• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 13: Modularity & Right to Repair - April 23, 2024
• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 12: Secure Supply Chain and Made in USA Electronics - April 22, 2024

One account for all things – the power of the Librem One username.

At Librem One you have One account to rule them all. One account to remember, One account to share with all; and no privacy to surrender.

One of the fundamental design goals for Librem One, outside of privacy, was linking all of our services under a single convenient login. This means that no matter how you want to connect with me, you have everything you need on this personal card:

Whether you want to follow me on Librem Social; email me on Librem Mail; or message me with text, voice or video on Librem Chat, you can do it all using todd@librem.one.

Discovering Others in the Community

Using your email address as the discovery tool across platforms makes it simple and convenient to find and communicate with people. As a remarkable side-benefit, it becomes very simple for people to determine the protocol-specific usernames—be those @todd@librem.one for social, @todd:librem.one for chat, or todd@librem.one for email.

As an example of how this works in practice, let’s say you have joined a room in Librem Chat—a room about a topic that interests you. You meet other interesting people and make some friends; it’s now easy to find and follow them on Librem Social, since the usernames are the same on both platforms.

A single login also makes things easy for Librem 5 users: when you first get your phone, if you have a Librem One account you will be able to enter a single login and have all of these services light up, ready to use.

Hasn’t This Already Been Done?

It has, but for (unfortunately) very different reasons. Many tech giants also offer a unified login that gets you access to a bundle of services—but convenience is only one of the motives, and often the most innocent one. You see, they also find a lot of value in being able to link your accounts across platforms, in order to be able to collect and correlate more data about you—as well as lock you into their complete proprietary product suite.

Our approach is different from your traditional unified login, because by using standards and open protocols—Mastodon, Matrix, Email, OpenVPN—that allow people to communicate outside private clubs (and be free from centralized authoritarian control), we can offer a service that has a built-in and thriving community of millions of people. We can also offer a service that allows people to move freely, to change providers, to have control over their digital lives.

By using free software like Tusky, Mastodon, Matrix, RIOT, K9, Dovecot, PureOS, etc., we participate in a strong ecosystem of millions of developers – who release authored code for others to use, as long as they follow the same licensing of share-alike. By bundling all these standards and protocols into a single account, we are making it safer and more convenient for people than the rights-stripping proprietary services from big tech.

Proprietary Services Make Logins Complicated

Even though big tech firms offer unified login, their commitment to lock-in, proprietary protocols means you instantly sacrifice convenience once you leave their club. Currently, you may be a member of countless private clubs, designed to exploit and control you, and not even know it. If I ask you what are all the ways I can contact you, you will probably answer with a list containing a username on Facetime, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Skype, Whatsapp, WeChat, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest… and a phone number and email, of course. All of these ways to communicate have their own logins and (mostly proprietary) protocols that don’t work with each other. The last one, the email, stands out as it was created as a standard, to allow interoperability across the world, regardless of what client or service you use; the same design choices of advancing standards made it into Librem One.

So instead of a laundry list of accounts, you can have one single, simple account that offers you all the same convenience of posting, chatting, messaging and sharing. You will be able to do all those things from different applications, but the only account you have to remember is your Librem One account.

Enjoy freedom, sign up now for Librem One!