(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.
Could be done in apps. Managing federation under the hood, I mean. I’m an absolute smoothbrain regarding all things web (or mobile lol), but I use my barebones, cobbled-together desktop Lemmy client sometimes, so maybe I could repurpose it for other users?
Absolutely, the backend federation protocol I personally think is great (though I question the scalability of a lot of the existing backend implementations). With some extra discovery services that help connect you to different instances, I think that would really help with some of the challenges I’ve personally see people run into
I don’t think you can completely hide the federation from users, since it does actually matter. For the same reason people can’t just ignore choosing an email provider when getting an email address. They literally have to pick one.
Yeah, I fully agree. It should be something more along the lines of “sane defaults” (seeing all instances, automatic recommendation on signup, app-level migration) than “autopilot”, but I will probably discuss this more once I have the time.