The Federated App Problem | PlugWorld

[utterances-bot]

The Federated App Problem | PlugWorld

Federated applications have a few problems. And I really wish it weren’t the case, I love the idea and philosophy of these applications. But I can’t see them being mass adopted. Learning curve First thing’s first, they’re not user intuitive. People are used to the idea of going to one url whether that be YouTube, Twitter, or Reddit to sign up and create content. But now users need to understand federation.

https://plug-world.com/posts/the-federated-app-problem/

[Savjee]

In general, I agree with your viewpoints. Here are some of my thoughts:

On the part about authentication: Mastodon does allow users to transfer their accounts to another instance. It does require both instances to be online though, so you can't migrate if your instance suddenly goes down and doesn't come back up. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/

This essentially steers me away from smaller instances, as stated previously.

I agree with this, and that's problematic. There's a tendency for big instances to become even bigger, re-introducing centralization in a federated model. At this point, the big ones could decide to defederate from others, effectively creating "filter bubbles" or echo chambers.

When multiple instances with different domains hosts the exact same content, Google will give these sites very low SEO ranking.

That shouldn't have to be the case. Adding a "canonical" tag could solve this. In that case, every instance would signal to Google where the original post is located. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls

This has been suggested by some people on Mastodon's issue tracker, but so far it's not implemented https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22907

[pimterry]

I think the SEO problem is easily solvable without any structural changes, it's just not implemented yet. See https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22907 - you can either set a canonical header (telling search engines which server 'owns' the federated content) or hide federated content from anonymous users entirely, so it's only ever indexed on the server it comes from. In either case, that problem disappears.

[HelamanWarrior]

@Savjee Thank you for your insights, I really appreciate it.

Mastodon does allow users to transfer their accounts to another instance. It does require both instances to be online though, so you can't migrate if your instance suddenly goes down and doesn't come back up.

That's so awesome! I had no idea Mastodon allows for account transfers. That's really sweet, obviously it's not super helpful when your instance goes down, but way better than nothing.

That shouldn't have to be the case. Adding a "canonical" tag could solve this. In that case, every instance would signal to Google where the original post is located.

I had no idea about the "canonical" tag that's really great. Thank you for pointing that out. I really hope to see more federated services incorporating this system. As far as I can tell right now, SEO is still a big problem. Maybe not as much for Mastodon, but for Lemmy or Kbin which is trying to be a Reddit alternative. I consider SEO to be vital. But having that feature in Mastodon will be great to have too.

[SimHoZebs]

Nostr solves the problem of authentication by signing messages with a secret key. The unique signature acts as your identity with the secret key acting as the authentication.