It’s easy to discover communities on my instance via the dedicated page in the hamburger menu. But let’s say I want to follow a community on another instance, such as !lemmy@lemmy.ml . I might have found its name mentioned in a post or comment. When I click on the provided link, I’m thrown on that instances web page, from which I of course can’t subscribe.
So what I instead have to do is to copy the description of the link and paste it in my instance’s search bar. Which isn’t easy, since it’s a link, so there isn’t even a straightforward way to select the link text without clicking the link. This seems very unintuitive and makes the process of joining a whole bunch of communities tedious. Is there a better way?
Would it be possible for there to be a cookie or something that stores the home instance of the user that other Lemmy instances can then read and redirect the user to? I’m not very knowledgeable with stuff like that but it sounds like it could work
I’m not a frontend dev, and I feel like CORS stuff comes into play here, but it should be possible to do something like the “Sign In With Facebook” or “Pay with Paypal” type of redirect after asking the user for their host. At very worst it should be possible to have Instance B’s backend send a call to Instance A after the user provides it with the name of the other instance, but you need to be careful about validating the legitimacy of the request in that case. There’s a lot of room for better cryptography/signatures in activitypub I’d imagine that could help.
That would probably require third party cookies which most people block for very valid reasons