As i learn my way around ActivityPub based services, what stands out to me the most is federation is very much exposed to the users. (That, or I still just haven’t wrapped my head around the architecture details and how they manifest in terms of user experience.)

Am I just misunderstanding this, or would the end-user experience be more fluid and functional if the federation mechanics were mostly ‘under the hood’. What I mean by that is - right now if there’s a community I would enjoy participating in that is located on a different instance, in order to do that I need to (a) know it exists in the first place, (b) know what instance it is on, and (c) explicitly tell my instance about its address in order to join.

Would it be possible to have some form of master index (replicated across instances - not a centralized service) along with a public standard for registering an instance/community on the index? And if something like that existed, couldn’t that push what is an inherently more technical detail to lower levels of the implementation, and make for a simpler UX by allowing every instance to expose a more complete list of communities to users from directly within whatever instance they choose to use?