Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

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> It is a different experience that takes a little time to understand.

I understand it fine. I just don't like it.

Obviously, different Mastodon instances don't have shared credentials. Which means that whenever you visit a different instance in a web browser, it doesn't know you, and thus you can't just follow someone, or have your preferences apply to the page, etc. It's unlikely that this problem will ever be solved, given the nature of the protocol, and given that it hasn't been solved yet.

I'm not ideologically attached to federation. All I wanted was an alternative to Twitter. I found that attempting to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon was unpleasant. I expect that other people — not everyone, but many — will feel the same way, which limits Mastodon's adoption.

> Mastodon is developed mostly by volunteers rather than a team of well paid UX specialists

I can sympathize with their lack of resources while still not wanting to use Mastodon myself.

I know it is not super easy to find and follow and your feedback is good. Another way of following someone who is not appearing in one of your timelines is to copy their ID into your Mastodon search bar and then click the follow icon that appears next to it.

Are we not on "Hacker News"? Someone could make a simple browser extension that auths with your home instance and gives buttons to follow people on other instances.

Couldn't the browser remember your home instance as an autocomplete "url" value[0]?

So you would click the "Add this person as a friend on my home instance" button on the third party page, and it would bring up a little text box which you could fill and submit with a couple of clicks, then it would redirect you to your instance with an agreed URL parameter, so that your instance would ask whether you really wanted to add them.

Assuming your instance remembers who you are with a cookie (and the third party instance can remember your home instance too), the process could be minimally onerous.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes...

There's an add-on that opens a pop-up of your instace, so you can easily remote-follow someone on a different server.

Agreed though that the UX must improve.

Edit: here it is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mastodon-simp...

It is technically impossible to be browsing user profiles on another server and then follow people with one click for this reason: People have multiple accounts. This is a feature to compartmentalize identities on the internet. You might have one account under your real name for people to find you, and you might have a different anonymous account for publicly posting political views that you don't want your fascist government or boss to associate to you.

Yeah, in that case, I think the status quo "works as designed". But I guess you could have the button trigger a drop down to select which account they want to follow from.

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