Following remote communities is hard.

It's easy to discover communities on my instance via the dedicated page in the hamburger menu. But let's say I want to follow a community on another instance, such as !lemmy . I might have found its name mentioned in a post or comment. When I click on the provided link, I'm thrown on that instances web page, from which I of course can't subscribe.

So what I instead have to do is to copy the description of the link and paste it in my instance's search bar. Which isn't easy, since it's a link, so there isn't even a straightforward way to select the link text without clicking the link. This seems very unintuitive and makes the process of joining a whole bunch of communities tedious. Is there a better way?

seirim,
@seirim@lemmy.ml avatar

Agreed, this is a huge sticking point

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

This could be something about it, give it a 👍 if you have Github

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1048

anji,

Having remote links load on my local instance so I could interact with them would be awesome. Even better if my instance would fetch a remove posts & comments so it would really look like one unified platform without missing remote information.

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

Lemmy is still on the very beginning of its existence. Mastodon and Misskey are more advanced but they were also born earlier. We can shape together how we want Lemmy to be, but it'll require time and patience :)

anji,

Mastodon for all its sophistication has exactly the same limitations though. Linking to a post is a full URL which takes me to a remote instance where I can no longer interact. And boosted posts are missing replies if they have not been previously pushed to my instance. I realize there's some problems with a fetch model (extra server load) but it would be so nice if I could browse the entirety of Fedi from the comfort of my own instance without having to paste URLs in search bars.

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

You're right, but Mastodon already has lifted some of those problems (because they had funding and energies).

Also if you need it, I know of this extension that's being developed that could the exact problem you're referring to: FediFetcher. It's still being developed but I think it's going to be very useful

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

If you really want to improve this, make a pull request. We are already very busy.

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

I wish I could but I don't know if I can 😭 Do you suggest any simple guide to learn what's needed for contributing to lemmy-ui?

Barbarian,

They've written this handy guide

Krusty,
@Krusty@feddit.it avatar

Cool, thanks! 💜

BrokenToshy,

Would second this. I'm a tech savvy person as I work in IT and even I'm having to think about what I'm doing just to subscribe to different communities, then there's multiple of the same communities on different instances etc it is quite tedious as you say.

Really struggling to see how this gets mainstream adoption as your average user isn't going to have much joy.. From my brief interaction with the fediverse I think it's going to become the Linux of social media I.e. for Geeks and Hobbyists rather than your every day user.

Xer0,

Honestly, I think that might be the point. Also, if this place got absolutely overrun with millions of new people, the place would suck. There is something great about smaller, tighter communities.

switchportmodeaccess,

You also have to create a new account for each instance. At very least I feel as though some centralized account orchestration needs to happen.

Lodion,

..that would defeat almost the entire point of being federated and decentralized.

hybridhavoc,
@hybridhavoc@beehaw.org avatar

This is not true. You can subscribe to a community on beehaw.org even if your account is on lemmy.ml. That's what this post is about, that the process for doing that is unintuitive.

SemioticStandard,
@SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml avatar

Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.

Kaldo,
@Kaldo@beehaw.org avatar

In my experience there are many good and positive casual users on reddit as well as toxic and obnoxious techies. Knowing how to navigate an obtuse UI is not a mark of good character.

SemioticStandard,
@SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml avatar

No, of course not, but the added…intentionality that it requires weeds a lot out. Remember, trolls usually go after that which requires the least amount of effort. So it’s not about being able to navigate a UI, it’s about effort.

Or maybe that’s just a bunch of bullshit. 4chan is pretty arcane from a UX perspective, and look at the cesspit that place is. I don’t know. It was just a thought experiment.

kosmo,

At the simplest I feel a chrome extension or similar would be straightforward. A more native flow doing some sort of faux login/modal that could subscribe on the primary host would be better.

mounderfod,

Would it be possible for there to be a cookie or something that stores the home instance of the user that other Lemmy instances can then read and redirect the user to? I'm not very knowledgeable with stuff like that but it sounds like it could work

kosmo,

I'm not a frontend dev, and I feel like CORS stuff comes into play here, but it should be possible to do something like the "Sign In With Facebook" or "Pay with Paypal" type of redirect after asking the user for their host. At very worst it should be possible to have Instance B's backend send a call to Instance A after the user provides it with the name of the other instance, but you need to be careful about validating the legitimacy of the request in that case. There's a lot of room for better cryptography/signatures in activitypub I'd imagine that could help.

morrowind,
@morrowind@lemmy.ml avatar

That would probably require third party cookies which most people block for very valid reasons

Xer0,

I would love for my one account to be able to access literally every federated service. Imo this is the one thing that would tie absolutely everything together. In my mind this kind of seems like the end goal of federation but I'm not really sure. It would make sense though.

naeap,
@naeap@sopuli.xyz avatar

this is currently possible in a way, as the instance you're on, includes your requested remote community. although it doesn't seem to work that stable at the moment

kosmo,

I haven't used it yet, but I wrote a small service to combine webfinger from subdomains into a primary domain, and ended up abandoning it. You'd need to handle more than just the webfinger stuff, and be able to route activity pubs as well, and I'm still learning about the protocol enough to see if this is possible. I think the best case is that locally you might be name@someinstance.example.com, but would federate as name@example.com, and webfinger/mentions would work for that, and something at example.com would route activity pubs appropriately to the "real" hosts with name rewriting.

Xer0,

I would love for my one account to be able to access literally every federated service. Imo this is the one thing that would tie absolutely everything together. In my mind this kind of seems like the end goal of federation but I'm not really sure. It would make sense though.

hybridhavoc,
@hybridhavoc@beehaw.org avatar

They are able to access, but what is not wanted (I think) is for every instance to have replicas of every other instance. That federation and replication should be (and is) based on user interaction.

workinkindofhard,

But instead of Crome, Firefox

hybridhavoc,
@hybridhavoc@beehaw.org avatar

I use a browser extension to make this sort of remote interaction easier for Mastodon. Seems like having something similar for Lemmy would not be impossible. I'm not a dev though and wouldn't know where to start.

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