Share your feedback about the 🆕 iOS Discourse Hub app

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The main sticking point for me is the same one I’ve experienced in the past: Authentication. I updated the app to the latest version and gave it another whirl. I followed a few communities in “Discover”. I then went to “Home” to log into them.

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Here’s what happened:

  • Authenticated meta. That worked.
  • Tried to authenticate Auth0. That failed, albeit I’m not entirely sure if that’s because I tried to use the wrong social login.
  • Tried to authenticate Hugging face. That succeeded, however the embedded browser then redirected me to the hugging face site. Which is fine I guess, but hardly the optimal experience. I don’t ever really want to use the hugging face site in a virtual browser inside the DiscourseHub app.
  • Tried to authenticate OpenAI and that failed too.

I know there are various reasons why authentication can fail and it’s partially dependent on the way its implemented on individual forums, however for that very reason I think it’s worth thinking through for the purposes of DiscourseHub (I’m sure others have, I’m just doing this myself too).

Here’s one way it could possibly work a bit better. I’m just thinking this through as I write it, so it’s not going to be airtight, but some version of this might work:

  1. You sign into an account in the app itself tied to an email address (the email is verified in the process).

  2. The Hub registers itself with instances that are followed, i.e. effectively every instance participating on the hub.

  3. The Hub is an “automatically enabled” provider for DiscourseConnect, i.e. with it’s own key or secret that its sends to instances to be used in the auth flow. Obviously this would have to be tightly controlled, however considering Discourse controls the Hub app this seems doable.

  4. The Hub attempts to automatically authenticate the user based on their verified email using the hubs special auto-enabled DiscourseConnect provider status. If the verified email matches an account on the instance, the user is automatically logged in.

You’d want to limit it to authenticating with existing accounts associated with the same email, however that would allow for a fair degree of automatic authentication. In my case at least I would probably be automatically logged in to all the forums in my list.

I appreciate this raises various issues, but considering authentication feels (at least to me) the biggest pain point in using the Hub, something like this seems worth considering (as I suspect it has been?).

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