[jrmg]

As I follow these new accounts, I’m reminded of just how _hard_ it is to follow people on other servers on Mastodon.

Click follow -> dialog full of text, which gives the most common instructions (to copy and paste into the search field on your server) in smaller text at the end -> go to my server -> there’s no search field, or anything that says ‘search’ -> [I know that this is because my window is too narrow] -> expand the window -> paste into the revealed search field -> click ‘follow’ on the result -> Phew!

Now I have to do this again for the other accounts…

I’m absolutely sure people become lost and give up at every step here.

[calgarymicro]

They have very recently uploaded this flow a bit. Most servers don't seem to have it yet, but mastodon.social does. Now, the first time you try to follow or do something when your account is somewhere else, it asks you to type in your home server, then takes you there to log in. From then on, it will remember your home server and allow you to see the relevant post/profile on your server with one click. So the process is now click follow -> click 'Take me home' -> click follow again. Still not great, but a lot better than it was.

Example: https://i.imgur.com/MG1d5kV.jpg

[kstrauser]

That seems typical of the mastodon.social instance: roll out something that works for them, then likely call it a day and mark it solved.

There are about 23,000 fediverse servers online today. The mastodon.social instance is the largest, with about 1/5th of the monthly active users. The other 23,000 servers with the remaining 80% of users won't benefit nearly so much from that hacky feature.

[gargron]

mastodon.social runs nightly releases off of our GitHub. Anyone can run nightlies to get these features. Or wait for the stable. What's hacky about this feature?

[kstrauser]

Mainly that it only benefits giant instances. That's a convenient feature for people on a tiny instance following users on mastodon.social, but adds friction for users on mastodon.social who want to follow users on a tiny instance.

I haven't looked at the implementation, but I'll assume it's flawless. The issue is that it doesn't address the broader problem. Like the "official" iPhone app that has a giant, colorful "Join mastodon.social" button above a transparent "Pick another server" option, it serves to push people toward m.s and away from a good federated experience.

[afavour]

I’m not sure I grasp the argument here. No feature should be switched on until all 23,000 servers have updated to the necessary version?

[kstrauser]

> I’m not sure I grasp the argument here. No feature should be switched on until all 23,000 servers have updated to the necessary version?

It's not about having the necessary version. The feature has to be cookie driven, right? Otherwise, mastodon.social wouldn't be able to remember that an unauthenticated visitor has an account elsewhere. Such a cookie almost certainly won't be available across servers (thanks, ad trackers for ruining it for everyone). That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit.

Think of it this way: suppose a user visits a tiny Mastodon server at social.example.com. They click a user's follow button. How will social.example.com know to redirect the user to the home instance they configured when they visited mastodon.social?

> If I’ve downloaded the Mastodon app without having a server in mind what is the app supposed to do, just list them all?

If someone clicks the "pick another server" option, they're taken to a perfectly serviceable chooser. That should have been the default. It works for all the other apps that don't default to mastodon.social.

[treyd]

On Mastodon's interface if you see a foreign post locally on your timeline can see the poster's profile from there and follow it there. But all this is really a limitation of the web interfaces. There's extensions to assist with this process and desktop and mobile clients don't have this issue at all.

[barathr]

That's just on the web interface -- all the apps make it much easier.

[anderspitman]

Hopefully we'll see browser integration eventually

[tempaccount420]

Federations are the worst way to implement decentralization. All because people are afraid of blockchains.

[regularjack]

Right, it's only because of fear that blockchains aren't used for this use case, there are no other differences whatsoever.