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Comment by pbjerkeseth | Hacker News Reader

First hearing of tangled, tried signing up and this first time user experience needs to be tightened up. Currently unwilling to sign in because of the friction I ran into using a password manager. From what it looks like they:

- ask you for an email

- send you an email

- ask you for a username

- except you cant actually log in with this username directly

- im being forced to learn some new social url protocol

- why does the auth flow pass me through a new ui/url that seems owned by the project but visually disconnected (eg, different branding/colors for the form)

- my password manager couldnt bridge the gap

I'm notoriously fickle about dealing with signup/login friction, but the project sounds cool so hopefully my feedback is more actionable than curmudgeony.

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Fwiw the sign up/in process for me was "click login, type in my existing blue sky handle, type in my password (into a bsky domain name login prompt), click authorize".

I expect that's the... more optimized flow at this point in this forge's life.

> - why does the auth flow pass me through a new ui/url that seems owned by the project but visually disconnected (eg, different branding/colors for the form)

Probably because of the above, identity isn't tightly associated with the app you're using here so they've stood up their own infra for it but probably not spent too much time on making it good.

> - except you cant actually log in with this username directly

Really? That's strange... I haven't made a native account... what do you need to login with then?

a "username.tngl.sh" schema, which is that I meant by the unfamiliar protocol in the next bullet

Oh, that is unfortunate. Bluesky implicitly adds the .bsky.social domain name. Hopefully tangled starts doing the same some day.

Does it? I just tried logging in without typing the full username and it didn't work.

Blue sky... Yes, at least for me. I double checked in private browsing before posting that claim.

That's your handle and it points to the server where your atproto account's data is stored. You can use this same login for other atproto apps and it will all be stored on the server at tngl.sh A username.bsky.social handle just means bsky set up that account and your data lives at the bsky.social PDS. You can migrate to a different PDS and change your handle if you don't trust them. You can host a PDS yourself if you like. I agree it's a little clumsy, but I'm sure friction can be reduced.

The idea is to give users control over their identity, network, and feeds instead of big social platforms like facebook or twitter that choose what content you see and lock you into their closed network.