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Darius Kazemi

Iiiinteresting, Mastodon changed the behavior for what happens when you are viewing the user profile on a remote server and hit "follow". Instead of the often-not-working "remote follow" action, you now get this modal that says "please copy/paste this into your client and hit follow"

Screenshot of a modal popup that offers two options for following a user when you're not logged in on the page you're viewing (if it's not your server, for example). First option is to sign in on the local server, second option is to copy/paste a url into "the search bar of your favourite app or the web interface where you are signed in".
26 Oct 2022 at 14:57 | Open on friend.camp
12 comments
Nelson Chu Pavlosky

@darius I assume this would break the "simplified federation" Firefox add-on I've been using: github.com/rugk/mastodon-simpl

It works well, but having to install software to follow people may be a non-starter for most.

26 Oct 2022 at 15:04 | Open on jawns.club
Nelson Minar 🧚‍♂️

@darius clumsy but maybe better than the mess it used to be? I also hate how I can't simply reply when viewing a post alone on the home server's URL. (Just made that mistake replying here!) This federation stuff has a lot of rough edges.

26 Oct 2022 at 15:29 | Open on tech.lgbt
Darius Kazemi

@nelson I think it's clumsy and overall probably a net neutral change. It'll be helpful for some people, unhelpful for others. It is unfortunately a very hard UX problem to solve while maintaining actual decentralization (there are some decent solutions but they ultimately involve building some kind of centralizing coordinating layer)

26 Oct 2022 at 15:36 | Open on friend.camp
Gracious Anthracite

@darius @nelson

I wonder if this is a job for a browser extension. Tell it that you’re @foobar@example.horse and it coordinates with/modifies the site’s HTML to make stuff work.

The shrinking space of what browser extensions can actually do to a page is probably going to make that harder than it should be.

26 Oct 2022 at 17:19 | Open on dragon.style
Zack Weinberg

@darius What is the form of the "different server" URL? I want to try to construct it by hand for someone I've been so far unable to follow from h.t

26 Oct 2022 at 15:30 | Open on hackers.town
Darius Kazemi

@zwol https://social.example/@user -- for mastodon accounts at least it is simply the base url for the profile

26 Oct 2022 at 15:34 | Open on friend.camp
Zack Weinberg

@darius hmm, I think this may only work on instances that have the UI change you describe, i get a 404 page if I put any username after https :// hackers . town /

26 Oct 2022 at 16:12 | Open on hackers.town
Darius Kazemi

@zwol it has worked for me for as long as I've used Mastodon -- they are surfacing a feature that has simply been unadvertised. Specifically putting the url in is a way to bust the local cache and refetch a profile

26 Oct 2022 at 16:13 | Open on friend.camp
Zack Weinberg

@darius strange. @thegibson do you have any idea what might be wrong here?

26 Oct 2022 at 16:17 | Open on hackers.town
alys

@darius if people are following links from their home instance to another instance, i suppose instances could use the referer header (after checking the domain is a mastodon instance and not another website) and send them back to that instance. might have to make it opt-in for privacy reasons.

26 Oct 2022 at 17:31 | Open on selfy.army
Kat M. Moss

@darius I saw that a couple of times last week... thought it was just a janky server setting in that particular instance. Appears it's a global change...

27 Oct 2022 at 15:32 | Open on indieweb.social
iluxan

@darius I have some idea of how mastodont federation works, but what does this mean in context of using the iPhone app?

31 Oct 2022 at 0:48 | Open on mastodon.social
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