this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Evangelizing.
If I want to share a cool link with someone who has an account but is not yet active, I have to:
On centralized platforms I can hit the "share" button the moment I find something interesting. When I do, I will receive a single link that will work for all users of the service.
Granted (because the platform then harasses the user who follows the link, trying to annoy them into getting an account and/or logging in so that it can more accurately harvest their data) it's not a ton better centralized.
But it does make it extra difficult to evangelize this way. I convinced a friend to get an account, and yet when I shared a link with him (without taking the above steps), he sent back a screenshot of the banner telling him he wasn't logged in.
I'd like an easier way to pull the uninitiated into a conversation occurring on this network of sites.
I get it's some form of tracking and that scares people here, but I keep on thinking there must be a way to set up cookies or whatever the right term is so that when you click on a link you'll automatically get sent to the Lemmy post through your specific instance. I would suggest an extension but I'm personally of the opinion that any site that needs a third party extension (like say, RES or Xkit) to fully work isn't a well designed site (not to mention it makes evangelising harder because now you gotta sign up for a new confusing thing and download this extension)
Like everyone's screaming "use smaller instances!!!1!" But like, this issue pretty much tells you "you should be using the same big instances for the best sharing/viewing experience"
There's not a great solution to this and it's a real problem. The easiest way is an app or browser extension that could recognize lemmy domains and swap in your preferred instance. That gets into problem territory with defederation though.
Another way would be federating identity, people would still get log in messages at least the first time per instance, but they could log in as user@myinstance and get a logged in experience then. This is a huge technical pain in the ass, and still not great for user experience though.
You could also share links in a Url shortened style and use that redirect to let someone select an instance or log in to another service to know where to send links. This also isn't great.
The ideal would be a site that asks you for your instance once, saves it as a cookie, then automatically redirects you.
You would have to select it for each device, but that would work for most people that only use their phone.