I am building a small web app for all of my friends who are tired of Facebook. But to gain traction I want it to be easy to register as a new user. For everyone here it seems simple to create a Eurosky or Bluesky user, but it would seem complicated for many people. It is easy to add a “Don’t have an account“ link to Eurosky or Bluesky. But when the user has finnished filling out the form, he/she has to find the way back to the page. I don’t trust everybody will do that, many will give up. I am afraid to loose users if its too difficult to sign up.
It would be nice if the user could be redirected to the app after register, like when the log in.
Is there anyone who have thougts about this problem?
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Hiya, I made self.surf for this purpose, you can experience the signup and login on https://linkna.me/
Selfsurf frontend + backend (PDS) is all open-source under MIT and/or Apache 2.0.
If you do not want to self host you are welcome to use self.surf, please read the Legal page and client API terms. So far it is only me using self.surf so if you have feedback or questions I’d be happy to improve the terms.
Edit: Please note:
Self.surf uses ePDS and there are caveats, as its in active development.
- I have had issues with migrating my ePDS to Eurosky.social.
- 2FA auth is not yet finalized.
- I’m in the process of migrating to atmospheremail.com to decentralize the email relay from being in my control to not being in my control.
Edit2:
I don’t think self.surf is a good solution for a Facebook-usecase, because if it’s intended to be your primary PDS it is really bad for using multiple apps with. I think what could be really nice is to make onboarding super simple (email only via OTP, but then later have the user back-up their data by migrating to a PDS where it does support multiple apps).
Hey this is built into the PDS already with OAuth. I wrote a bit about it for the PDS I admin selfhosted.social
You can pass as the prompt create when creating the OAuth auth URL, this takes the user to the selected PDS and allows them to create an account and it then redirects them back to your atproto app logged in. You can do this for any open PDS, including eurosky.social
You can also view other atproto apps like https://stream.place and see where they implment something similar, but an added layer of a list of PDSs to select from
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Thank you! It works exactly like I wanted to!
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you’d probably want prompt=create which is supported by the reference PDS implementation (and discoverable via oauth metadata). It’s what we actually use on eurosky.social for the portal’s “create an account” flow.
So yeah, as bailey said. I am trying to get it standardised in AT Protocol’s OAuth profile itself, since I believe this is necessary functionality for helping onboard people to the Atmosphere, though this will take some time.
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This is super helpful, thanks! (@pds.dad was an accurate rename for your atproto account Bailey 
)
One further question to both you and @thisismissem.social; is there a way to pre-allocate a custom DNS entry as part of the prompt=create flow?
It would be useful to be able to let a new sign-up choose their handle from a domain I control, then send them through signup on a chosen PDS but without them being prompted to pick a “throwaway” handle provided by them.
I don’t think this exists, and it could be more than a little cheeky, so I figure it would be opt-in for PDS operators, who may also expect site owners to have framing like “Powered by Eurosky” or similar as part of the flow.
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