I’ve had a similar idea before for the join sites where they asks users a few questions about their interests/preferences and then redirect them to an instance based on that information. And when they sign up, it could also automatically subscribe them to the relevant hashtags/communities. Instance admins could be prompted when setting up the software if they want the site to send users to their instance (and how many they’re willing to take); this could work like a firehose distribution system to help avoid overwhelming infrastructure during exodus waves.
OpenWebAuth used to be called “Magic Auth”, because of how seamless the experience is. Instead of only being able to manage things from your social dashboard, you can jump from one part of the Fediverse to another, and your permissions will be granted automatically. It all happens in the browser.
The way this works is relatively simple: your browser accesses a token inside of a cookie. That token references your Digital Identity in the Fediverse, verifies it, and a handshake is performed. Afterwards, anything you were given permission to access unlocks and becomes visible on the page.
Will this be impacted by browsers killing third-party cookies?
I talked about this with someone else a few days ago. Professional content creators aren’t going to like the Fediverse very much, as the decentralization fundamentally means that there’s going to be a smaller audience for them to reach due to users being more spread out between instances in addition to the lack of ads and recommendation algorithms to spoonfeed their content to new viewers. There’s really no reason for them to prefer the Fediverse over the centralized corporate platforms that basically cater to their use-case. I don’t think it works as a profession here, at least in its current form. The Fediverse is good for hobbyists and everyone else though, whom I happen to prefer for the most part.
The platforms copied the design of centralized services without making enough adjustments to accommodate the different UX that a decentralized federated system brings. Some things that I think should be standard that currently aren’t:
- I want to be able to send search queries to other instances from my instance and have the results displayed back to me.
- I want to be able to browse the timelines of other instances from mine.
- PeerTube has a “remote subscribe” option where you fill in a little box with your @username@domain and it’ll open a window on your instance where you can follow the channel; I think this should be polished and then it’d be great.
- Every platform should support hashtags and instances should be aware of each other’s hashtag usage so the search can be smart and recommend sending queries to instances where the hashtag you’re looking up is most commonly used.
- Links to known Fediverse instances should open on your instance where you can interact with it rather than taking you to their instance where you can’t.
Implement these and the experience would be much better.
The questions should be fine for most people so long as they don’t go overboard with it. 2-3 should work. Select interests from a list (and have an option to fill some in), select moderation preferences from a list, and select a language/region from a list. There could even be a button that just selects an instance randomly for people who can’t be bothered (this can use the browser language to avoid sending people to instances in languages that they don’t speak).