A while ago I posted a thread back on the
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This is not really a problem on the desktop, as you’re using the browser to log in to the Fediverse. You go to mastodon.social or lemmy.world, maybe bookmark these, and you log in as normal (if you do not check the remember me option at login). Same goes with Facebook, with Xitter, with the
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Alright, but the newer generations (not everyone, but many folks part of them) rather use apps instead. And what do these apps do? Present a login screen with fields only for the username and the password (at most).
What are the Fediverse apps doing? They are also asking for the website where they would log you in. So you go open e.g. the Mastodon app, then type the website that you need to access (which in many cases it might not contain the word Mastodon in it), and only then you can enter the credentials.
What am I asking now (especially app developers): Wouldn’t it be better (if doable) to take some cues on how actually email (and XMPP for that matter) works, and ask the user for the username and the password instead in one go?
Like, everyone knows how to use email, everyone is familiar with that. And as I mentioned, XMPP is also doing it as well:
Wouldn’t it be doable?
Brute forcing thousands of servers to detect accounts would be awful, especially if the server you’re using doesn’t happen to be in the index of the app you’re using. It’d also be a massive privacy problem and likely violate the GDPR to leak what email addresses have registered accounts like that.
Asking for the full Fediverse username is much better, and some apps actually already do that. I think this is the best way forward. Other apps stick to their preferred default server, with the option for anyone who knows how the Fediverse works to pick their own if they’re not on the standard one.
As for making the Fediverse beginner friendly: it isn’t. People still struggle to understand why they can’t delete an email they’ve sent by accident after decades of daily use. To use the Fediverse, you need to either understand how the Fediverse works, or completely hide the fact that the system is federated. Threads just pretends federation doesn’t exist, for instance, and it worked out well.
If people don’t realise that @steve@mastodon.com and @steve@whatever.com are not the same person, things quickly become rather problematic. Scams become trivial, as do impersonation attempts. You get the same problem we have now with the tech illiterate not knowing that payyourtaxes@iamyourgovernment.ly is a scam.
Using the term “website” may be better, but if that’s the hurdle stopping people from joining, I’m not sure if the Fediverse is for them, to be honest, not in its current form. I also don’t think users have a problem with the term “server”, as can be seen with the many Discord “servers” that people join.