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by calgarymicro 1060 days ago
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
1 comments
kstrauser 1060 days ago
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.

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gargron 1060 days ago
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?
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kstrauser 1060 days ago
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.

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afavour 1060 days ago
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?
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kstrauser 1060 days ago
> 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.

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calgarymicro 1060 days ago
> That means a user would have to fill in that form for every single remote instance they visit

It looks like you're correct; I went looking and found that https://universeodon.com had the new feature as well, and I had to type in my home server URL again. I actually thought this was a great solution before I realized you'd have to do it for every server; hopefully they find a better solution for this.

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