Is ESS an OpenID compatible server, or does it integrate with OpenID backend? Looking for an OpenID provider for a small-medium friends & family group, so was hoping this fits the bill. There is a dearth of information on this aspect of the product line.
hm, i wrote an answer on this but it seems to have vanished.
ESS uses Matrix Authentication Service (https://github.com/element-hq/matrix-authentication-service/) which is a very lightweight Matrix-aware rust OIDC IdP intended for embedding into Matrix homeservers to make them OIDC-capable. It provides the same featureset as pre-OIDC Matrix auth, and then lets you delegate to an upstream IdP (keycloak, authentik, forgerock etc) for a full featureset (2FA, MFA, etc).
Regarding my use case, I'm basically the only user (I have multiple accounts, but I'm still the only person using this), I just needed a way to have one login for all my self-hosted services e.g. Nextcloud, Gitea, …
The story is, at first I used Zitadel, after trying out multiple other things like Keycloak or Ory, and then switched to Authentik, because I didn't really like the UI of Zitadel (too "enterprisy" for me, I like it more minimal, and for my setup it felt like I needed to configure too many things.).
But with Authentik I needed to configure like 3 three separate things to create a new "Application", I still don't understand why all these things are required, and if this is really needed to configure all these flows & stages, providers, outposts, ... (don't rememeber all the names, or how they were related to each other). I always just clicked through the UIs and left everything on default settings, which got really annoying after a while.
So I switched back to Zitadel, which has a pretty good UX for just creating a new application. Though it is still very confusing, all these settings which are specific for organizations or user specific, project specific etc., it's very often that I'm screaming "Where are the normal settings?".
I really would prefer to have something, where I don't need to worry about "Organizations" or "Projects", I understand that these are very useful if you use Zitadel "normally" (i.e. in an organization with multiple real people), but for my use-case it just adds too many layers which I don't need. I only need to create new users, and applications, that's it.
Thank you so much for the feedback, this really helps, even if you are a "solo" user!
I see what you mean with "enterprisy", that has some truth to it ;-)
We have some ideas to improve this and to reduce the learning curve for that.
I guess from many people we could "hide" the whole multi-tenancy part and just given them a single organzitation to start with.
