These are some personal notes I took from a session at IIW and a few exploratory designs that occurred to me while meeting folks there.
@aaronpk and I hosted a session at IIW on the topic of ways in which the browser could help the the fediverse succeed.
We discussed a few things, like being able to being able to facilitate the discovery of your ActivityPub instance when you are interacting with another ActivtyPub instance.
For example, we discussed how we all had trouble with the unnecessary friction involved in discovering your instance by manually typing it:
@aaronpk and mine's intuition was that this problem is systemic across every federated system, and equivalent to a proposal on how to make this better for the Indie Web:
How the browser materializes this UX is obviously its own choice, but I think there is something powerful that happens when we transpose this to the URL bar:
I think once you get things into the URL bar, it can become an anchor to a lot more social gestures between websites.
For example:
This translates well too for instances you don't operate yourself:
Or even actions that aren't even that social:
There are a lot of open UX design questions here, here are a few formulations to give you a sense of other materializations:
Regardless of which specific materialization we pick, I just wanted to write down an idea that occurred during IIW that I think could be pretty cool to explore further.
At this point, this is just an early idea that I wanted to get out there to get a sense of what folks may think.
WDYT?