(reposted this from r/fediverse)
Should federated social media have a centralized website that users use to access it?
It would be like starting a server for a video game. If I host, say a Minecraft server, my friends won't connect directly to the server, rather we will all use the same software (Minecraft) to connect. In a similar way I could start a Mastodon instance, but we would all go to a single website, something like mastodon.com, and type in the url to my instance to access it.
The benefit of this would be removing a lot of friction that comes with interacting with users across instances. If I, a user of mas.to visit a user profile from someone on mastodon.world, I need to actually navigate to the website mastodon.world to see all of their posts. From here, I lose the ability to like posts, reply, or basically do anything. I need to copy the link back to my home instance to do anything with the content on mastodon.world
This is really confusing to users who haven't even realized they have been navigated to a different website, since the UI is all the same. One of my friends stopped using mastodon because she was confused why she kept being logged out seemingly for no reason. It's also unnecessary friction that stops me from being able to interact properly with the entire fediverse.
If I was accessing mastodon through a centralized website, I could stay logged in while viewing a profile or post from another user, and I still would be able to interact with it. I would never be navigated away to another website and logged out. It would be a much less confusing and frustrating experience and lower the barriers between instances.
I think Lemmy's solution is better, but still not perfect. I can subscribe to communities of other instances from my own instance, but only if either a) I know the exact name and search for it, or b) someone else did before me.
I think discoverability tools can help with this. If the community browser was improved and integrated into the web-ui and app, that would greatly simplify things.
Also, visiting a federated URL of a community never accessed before should result in a short loading icon while your instance loads the content, not a 404 error
Is the instance hosting the community contained in the URL? Then it should be easy to implement, otherwise it's probably much more complicated.
Yes. For example, https://Your.Instance/c/[email protected]
For both users and communities, it's always name@domain
Then it should be quite easy. Did you post the request to GitHub?
Not yet, planning to tomorrow
It would be nice if by default links to other Lemmy instances would open a copy of that community or post in your own instance. Right now it's very hard to click links to other nodes' communities.