Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddythompson80 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with federation is that “HTTP browsers” simply just don’t work that way.

There is nothing you can do to make Firefox or Chrome to understand what a “federated network” even is. For a browser, an “Origin” is an extremely well defined concept. You can’t just decide to amend it because that’s how you feel it ought to be. If you can’t make mastodon.social be relates to social.mastodon in the browser, then you’ll have a rough edge. And that’s just to start. Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues that all could be attributed to what a “browser” interrupts HTTP or the internet to be vs what is actually possible.

View on HN

> Federated services have so, so so so, many usability issues

I like how you're talking about it like it's some abstract underground BBS style system that requires a modem, ISDN line installed, custom software running on a unix subsystem

I mean I found https://fosstodon.org/home signed up, clicked on local, liked posts, followed people, now I get a stream of posts to my home feed every day

Maybe your everyday facebook user might struggle with the idea of signing up to a site and interacting with it but I'm just not seeing why anyone who can sign up to discord or reddit would struggle with it

Try loading up an image on a different instance, or browsing that instance from a different instance. If you can figure it out, it's as slow as molasses.

Fosstodon posts that are on my home feed from other instances like this: https://imgur.com/6ToDHHm which is from floss.social load up instantly

Looking at the image source despite it being uploaded to another instance it's hosted on Fosstodon: https://cdn.fosstodon.org/cache/media_attachments/files/110/...

That said when I see posts linked to Mastodon on HN I do notice that maybe the HN Hug of Death hits them hard as they are noticeably slower to load than my day to day interaction with Mastodon, maybe this is what you're seeing?

I'm sure it's fine if both servers have the resources but visiting a small instance from a different small instance and all the images load really slowly.

There's absolutely nothing stopping browser vendors from implementing ActivityPub. I don't think the browser is the right place, but browsers also implemented automatic RSS feed detection for more than a decade so it's not exactly unprecedented either.

Browsers don't need to care, anyway. There are some problems that need solving (notably, following/interacting with users on other platforms) but there are ways to do that. I'm not quite sure why nobody has come up with a good standard for a web-activitypub: URL handler, but once everyone agrees on a format adding support for cross-server stuff should be easy.

Web browsers can access webmail clients and mailing lists just fine. They even have mailto: as a means to cross the federation gap. All of these problems are implementation issues, not conceptual impossibilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com