(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.
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but the extent to which current solutions are decentralized actually makes it difficult to gain critical mass. When watching others (previous Twitter and Reddit users that are not very tech savvy) try and use Mastodon or Lemmy, it’s very clear the idea of federation still is pretty foreign, despite having used it in email for a long time.
I think OP has a very valid point: providing a better experience through the illusion of centralization could be beneficial to transition users to the Fediverse.
And this actually doesn’t destroy the whole purpose of federation to begin with:
It’s clear with Apollo, RiF, Tweetbot, and every other “third party” social media client that the actual interface is often fungible and there’s enough demand-- when the social network is large enough-- to support multiple, high quality clients.
Reddit isn’t dying because of the interface itself, despite the app and new website being terrible user experiences. They’re running into challenges because they are upsetting the user base by exerting control over the content. Yes, you now must consume Reddit through the official interface, but it’s not the interface itself.
But federation is not about the interface, it’s about distributing the content in a way that results in a network that has no single authority over it. Regardless whether one particular UI or app does something unpopular, your content is all safe on your server and federated to others, and you can simply switch.
There’s obviously still challenges if “mastodon.com” provided a “centralized” UI and literally everyone gravitated towards it (it makes it harder for the critical mass of users to migrate later), but they don’t actually ever have control. In this scenario they may have more mindshare, but federation makes the network (and its most important asset: the content) resilient as a whole.
Could be done in apps. Managing federation under the hood if the user wants so, 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.
That’s already happening with using an app like jerboa
apps are the solution. do we all go to email.com to access our email accounts? nah i like there being multiple sites, UX can be bettered in other ways
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/gaming@beehaw.org
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 when I get home tomorrow. Bit different to quickly post a few sentences here than properly write up an issue on GitHub:)
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.
