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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

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culi

> Yes, but it's incredibly hard -- try to follow them on whatever server you're on

Confused about this. In my experience it's always just been a matter of adding

@personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com

Is this not always so simple?

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"Remote follow" is very unintuitive, particularly for Twitter users.

1. View a user's profile page on another instance.

2. Click "Follow".

3. A "remote follow" window opens with the message "Enter your username@domain you want to act from".

4. ???

How profile pages are displayed changes depending on whether you middle/right click ("open in new tab") or left click on a user's name from your own instance. If you left click, you get the profile page on you own instance. If you get the link by any other means (including e.g. someone sends you a link to their profile), you get the above. It's confused me more than once.

The problem is that is not centralized server and even can be a different type of server like Pleroma, Misskey or any other that supports ActivityPub so it works different, They have to learn that ActivityPub/Mastodon is different and works different the same they had to learn how Twitter works or just stay in Twitter if it's too hard or too painful for them.

This is like when computer geeks don’t get why people won’t switch from windows to Linux. If you don’t understand why they don’t want to, or why there will never be a massive shift to Mastodon you’ll never fix the issue. Your suggestion is not “simple”. My non tech wife doesn’t care about instances and this and that. She goes to Twitter, she types in her favorite people, finds and follows. Done.

im still confused about The Terrible Time people are having here...

for example. if i want to search for @johnnydick@head.com... i do that, and click follow.

thats it. i click follow. like, where are you guys having so much trouble with this?

It's exactly the same you don't like it you stay with Windows or Twitter oar Facebook . Why do people have to jump to the Fediverse now. They don't like it they just can stay where they are , everybody happier.

How is this any different from typing @gmail.com vs @yahoo.com? People seem competent enough to handle emails...

The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over. It should be rare to never that you need a specific user id, let alone a specific server. You should just have to see a user and click follow.

Can you not do that?

Imagine I'm on hacker news and there's someone on mastodon I think someone should follow and their mastodon handle is @cooldude@cooldude.example.com (because they are so cool they run their own instance).

You definitely can't click that handle and add follow them, I could put https://cooldude.example.com/@cooldude and you could click to their profile on their instance, but there would be no way to follow them directly from there on your mastodon.social (or whatever) account, you have to go to your instance and type/paste in their handle and then click follow.

Edit: There is a remote-follow workflow that involves clicking a link and entering your full handle to get redirected to a page where you can follow them. Maybe slightly better, but still not great.

You can just put that full name in the search bar on your own instance and follow them from it. You don't have to go to their instance at all.

I mean, I'm not saying that mastodon is super duper easy to use for everyone but in this particular example you seem to be going out of your way to make it more complicated than it is.

If the thing you found on hn was a link to their profile your flow would make sense, but if you have an id@domain the flow is really simple and basically the same as other similar things (ie. put it in your email client).

I was replying in context to the comment above about typing in the handle, and I would put copy/paste in the same category.

With email addresses, you have the mailto: link, which works pretty well so you don't have to copy paste. Maybe we need a follow: url scheme that browsers know what to do with.

I wouldn't be surprised to see that come into existence now honestly.

Is this something that is just crappy with the workflow, so other clients could be better or a limitation of the current mastadon server implementation not providing enough information?

Not sure what you mean, I think that is a valid point.

I don't use mastadon, so learning that the idea it doesn't have a registered "follow" scheme is not great.

You should just have to see a user and click follow.

Which you can, regardless of what instance they're on.

Moving in bulk is also easy, using something like Debirdify

https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

You can't do this on the web interface unless you're on the same instance. It's pretty clunky right now.

Correction: You can't do it if you are linked to their user page https://mastodon.social/username...that doesn't work if you're not on mastodon.social. And often I seem to find myself at these URLs and can't see if I'm following the person, and have to go through extra steps to follow them.

> The moment you're manually typing a username it's game over.

Is copy/paste also too much to ask of technology's current generation?

Let's be honest. Copy-Paste sucks on most mobile. And mobile is where most people are at, especially on social.

Yes.

Yes. As it happens, it’s really hard to copy a Mastadon ID (or whatever it’s called) on Mobile. iOS at least interprets it as an email address and launches a mail client, and actively prevents copying it to the clipboard.

Actually someone pointed out you don't even need to do that much

There's a big (and only) search bar at the top of the homepage. You can simply search the username and they'll pop up across instances. There's a little follow button next to their name you can click and you're done

Exactly like Venmo or Snapchat or Instagram. It's already in the cultural norms to ask "what's your insta" or "what's your venmo".

What's your mastodon?

Right, we need the user to figure out what "just adding @personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com" entails.

I think it means going to your home instance, searching for @personiwannafollow@otherinstance.com and clicking the follow button that will show up. But maybe you mean something else? Either way it's not easy to find it.

Oh right I forgot you can just search. In that case you don't even need the "otherinstance.com" part

You can just search for "@personiwannafollow" and they'll show up and you can hit a single button to follow.

It's the big, and only, search bar at the top of the home page...

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