Is there a way to link to Mastodon instance with a Toot pre-filled? What I’m aiming for is a “Share on Mastodon” button, that takes the user to their home instance, with the Toot box pre-filled.
I’ve already found and built a widget for the external-follow url.
If I can’t find this, looks like I’ll be building a whole-ass browser-based Masto client.
@earnestma beautiful, thank you! That is *exactly* what I was after!
I can think of two ways, and neither is really good.
The first would be some kind of link handler. That's not quite the same as a browser based AP client, but it'd probably end up being close. You'd have a mastodon:// link and then something you configure would know how to handle that link- I think Mastodon would need changes to support it too.
The other way might be some kind of redirection service, but then you'd have to log into it for redirection.
@emacsen I’ll probably end up doing it the same way my “Follow this blog” widget works, where the link takes the visitor to a form to get their instance, then forwards them to where they need to be.
I also have an idea to do it completely in-page without the interstitial, but for my first draft I aimed for easy as possible to use, so for now it’s just a link to the widget.
@emacsen @silvermoon82 I can add something like this for Epicyon, but really it needs to be something standardized in the spec. It could be called a remote comment link.
@bob agreed! I’m honestly a little surprised it’s not already in the spec, since external interaction is sort of what Fedi is all about.
@silvermoon82 @bob I hadn't thought of it before, but it would make sense for blog comments and perhaps also as a way of generally promoting the idea of having a fediverse account.
The process for getting anything into the ActivityPub spec - however sensible - seems to be dysfunctional at best.
@bob
hey, does Epicyon already support something like Masto's `approve_interaction` url?
It looks like the server sends a header `user-agent: Epicyon/...` I can use that to detect you, so it's just a matter of a landing page to support you in my Follow widget.
If you're taking feature requests, that plus a landing page to prefill a toot would give me about everything I'm looking for.
@silvermoon82 @bob I don't think there is anything like that currently, but there could be.
Not what you asked for but if you just composed a nice toot with a copy to clipboard button I would find that very helpful.
It's more interoperable which is good but also doesn't encourage mastodon usage, which I guess is what you're after.
@az I’m targeting Masto to start just because that’s the one I use; my end goal is to promote Fedi more generally. I should be able to add other systems to my widget pretty easily; when the visitor enters their instance I’ll poke it to see what platform it is.
I want to make it easier for users across the board, more sharing on the whole fediverse makes it better for all of us.
Copy to clipboard is a good idea, I hadn’t thought of doing it that way!
@az
Copy to clipboard was a really good thought; now my widget falls back on that if it can’t automatically send the visitor to their instance.
I’m also thinking about making a straight-up Copy to Clipboard share button for WordPress. You’re right, it’s hard to beat that for interoperability.
@silvermoon82 There's this https://github.com/Aly-ve/Mastodon-share-button, but for the prefilling text there's the https://$instance/share?text=... url