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Should federated social media have a centralized website that users use to access it?

(reposted this from r/fediverse)

Should federated social media have a centralized website that users use to access it?

It would be like starting a server for a video game. If I host, say a Minecraft server, my friends won't connect directly to the server, rather we will all use the same software (Minecraft) to connect. In a similar way I could start a Mastodon instance, but we would all go to a single website, something like mastodon.com, and type in the url to my instance to access it.

The benefit of this would be removing a lot of friction that comes with interacting with users across instances. If I, a user of mas.to visit a user profile from someone on mastodon.world, I need to actually navigate to the website mastodon.world to see all of their posts. From here, I lose the ability to like posts, reply, or basically do anything. I need to copy the link back to my home instance to do anything with the content on mastodon.world

This is really confusing to users who haven't even realized they have been navigated to a different website, since the UI is all the same. One of my friends stopped using mastodon because she was confused why she kept being logged out seemingly for no reason. It's also unnecessary friction that stops me from being able to interact properly with the entire fediverse.

If I was accessing mastodon through a centralized website, I could stay logged in while viewing a profile or post from another user, and I still would be able to interact with it. I would never be navigated away to another website and logged out. It would be a much less confusing and frustrating experience and lower the barriers between instances.

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  • This is likely an unpopular opinion, but the extent to which current solutions are decentralized actually makes it difficult to gain critical mass. When watching others (previous Twitter and Reddit users that are not very tech savvy) try and use Mastodon or Lemmy, it's very clear the idea of federation still is pretty foreign, despite having used it in email for a long time.

    I think OP has a very valid point: providing a better experience through the illusion of centralization could be beneficial to transition users to the Fediverse.

    And this actually doesn't destroy the whole purpose of federation to begin with:

    It's clear with Apollo, RiF, Tweetbot, and every other "third party" social media client that the actual interface is often fungible and there's enough demand-- when the social network is large enough-- to support multiple, high quality clients.

    Reddit isn't dying because of the interface itself, despite the app and new website being terrible user experiences. They're running into challenges because they are upsetting the user base by exerting control over the content. Yes, you now must consume Reddit through the official interface, but it's not the interface itself.

    But federation is not about the interface, it's about distributing the content in a way that results in a network that has no single authority over it. Regardless whether one particular UI or app does something unpopular, your content is all safe on your server and federated to others, and you can simply switch.

    There's obviously still challenges if "mastodon.com" provided a "centralized" UI and literally everyone gravitated towards it (it makes it harder for the critical mass of users to migrate later), but they don't actually ever have control. In this scenario they may have more mindshare, but federation makes the network (and its most important asset: the content) resilient as a whole.

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