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@lemmy.ml . 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
But instead of Crome, Firefox
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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.
That would probably require third party cookies which most people block for very valid reasons
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.
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.
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.