I made this change to increase software support for Lemmy Federate. This way, besides Lemmy and Mbin, other software that supports FEP-1b12 such as NodeBB, Piefed, Guppe, Friendica or other custom implementations (like blogs) will be able to register to Lemmy Federate.
However, I must admit that this change makes the login mechanism more difficult. But I believe it was worth it.
An example authentication flow:
- Enter instance host and click login
- Add given record to DNS, and click login again
- At this point, API key becomes reusable between logins.
If you experience any problems please let me know.