Comment by quaintdev
2 years ago
The most ridiculous problem with Mastodon I think is the fact that even if I visit his profile I can't follow him because we are on two different servers. I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance. This then takes me to his profile where I can follow him. That's just too much work!
The mechanism is not friendly or intuitive but:
1. On your own instance ...
2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...
3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".
4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...
5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.
If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.
Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.
(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)
There's a few browser extensions that help with that. I just started using this one, it's pretty slick: https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct
The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.
Wow, why the hell would any normie use this?
Having to install a browser extension makes it a hard no for many, the most annoying thing for me is there's no app like Tweetbot for Mastodon that's even like 5% as useful.
I know many people used Twitter.com or their official app, but many people find a simpler native app experience much more useful.
1 reply →
That's why you see Mastodon customer support here and on Mastodon itself by the techies here just for choosing an instance and even explaining why it is all slower than Twitter. For example: [0]
Normal people do not care enough to go on a safari hunt for finding instances, user names of those claiming to have left Twitter or deleting their accounts or even bothering self-hosting just for a username on their own instance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042216
To make the user experience more like what they're used to from Twitter.
It's frustrating that the web platform doesn't accommodate federated services like Mastodon that span multiple servers very well, but those are the cards we're dealt. It does work, it's just not ideal.
> I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance.
It used to be different; in older versions of Mastodon, when you clicked on the Follow link on another instance, it asked for the name of your home instance, and redirected to a pre-filled follow screen on it. This was probably changed because it's an obvious phishing risk: it could redirect you to a fake domain which asked for your Mastodon account credentials (as if your login had expired), so it's not good to get people used to that kind of mechanic.
I hope this will be made easier in the near future. In the meantime, you can use this browser extension: https://github.com/lartsch/FediAct#installation
It's a valid criticism. There's many browser extensions that "fix" this.
Many servers have a link that let's you sign in when you click the follow button. it's a bit janker than ideal.