I am mentally preparing to be called an idiot and/or causing a shitstorm, but I really want to get the answer.
I really want to completely get out of all other social media platforms and to become more involved in the Fediverse, but there is one thing that still bugs me about the underlying concept or at least the frontend behavior.
Let’s say I get to discover a very interesting account. Why is it that I cannot just click on the “Following” stat and see what other accounts that person or organization is itself interested in and then just click on follow from there? Every time I have to open a browser, and I only get to look at them since I don’t have an account on that instance. And the same thing with followers of course.
I completely understand the interest to remain federated, but the federation being reflected in this kind of UX is, IMHO, a terrible hindrance to growth, or, in the most optimistic scenario, cause a slow migration to a single server.
I would be ok with keeping the power for servers to completely obscure even all the rest of the Fediverse if they want, but if you are showing me a bit of information and allowing me to click on it, you shouldn’t then punish me for being interested.
I have no idea whether this is due to ActivityPub, to the single servers (I am on Mastodon.uno btw) or to the clients, but it’s, as of now, the only thing I can think of still keeping me from letting myself go and truly join the Fediverse.
It may well just be me not fitting the community, and of course I am ignorant of the costs associated with such operations, but as a user, especially on a mobile client, the extra clicks and copy-pasting I just tested are absolutely way too many.
Could a client solve this problem by automating some or all of these steps? I don’t mean to build the full database of all instances, but instead to query for those specific followers of that specific account and allowing the possibility to follow, upon request.
I don’t see how. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable than me will answer, but - generally speaking - you don’t want a page you’re viewing to be doing live queries of completely external resources, for instances that might be down, or timeout, or need another query because they need a signed GET request instead of an unsigned one. It’s not usual for accounts to be following 1000s of other other users, so you’d be sat in front of a spinning wheel, not knowing what’s going on, and not knowing when it’s going to finish.
Another user replied to me to say that once you’ve pasted your handle into that box once for one user, it’s already pre-filled for the next one, so that reduces the burden a bit.