Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Jeff Geerling

I think the thing I dislike about Mastodon the most is kind of a core part of the federation:

There are so many times I end up on a toot page on some instance that's not my primary instance, and I go to 'retoot' (boost) the thing, then up pops the whole "you have to copy this address, go to your instance, paste it in search, then you can retoot it there" schpiel

Too much cognitive overhead, and the workflow is terrible on touchscreen, so I just don't do it.

23 comments
Jeff Geerling

Centralization would solve it... but then that's kind of antithetical to the whole fediverse.

Also I remember there's a Mac client for Mastodon now (Ivory for Mac), need to try it out.

Cameron Bielstein

@geerlingguy Yeah, the apps are generally much better at this kind of thing.

Joe Pasqua

@geerlingguy Yes, @Ivory makes much of that stuff go away. It's a much more pleasant experience.

deefdragon

@geerlingguy the key issue here imo is that activity pud defined an async protocol for delivering stuff, but no synchronous one so you can stay on one server and interact with multiple. it's been down to the individual app makers and software makers to build their own apis.

seeing/getting comments from boosted posts in your tl is only reasonable if you go to the original server for the same reason, and it sucks.

Andrew Miller

@geerlingguy I recommend also giving @MonaApp a try. It’s super customizable and a one time purchase instead of a subscription.

Sam Wronski

@geerlingguy Elk is also quite good and I found it removed a lot of that copy and pasting nonsense. It's a web app so it works everywhere and syncs across your devices in real time which is also quite handy.

Soatok Dreamseeker

@geerlingguy Yeah unfortunately apps make this 1000x better.

Ganderonus

@geerlingguy
I think that the solution is to have a browser extension that makes your account browser wide.

There even is something like this (from what I understand) for Firefox
addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firef
I haven't tried it though because I use fediverse mainly on my phone.

Herwig Hochleitner

@geerlingguy

I agree cross-server mastodon interactions are a problem.

Maybe we could have a kind of "minimal" centralization, just for cross-server following and such.

Kind of like matrix.to/ does for redirecting to different kinds of matrix clients.

Dr. Quadragon ❌

@geerlingguy To be honest though, the sheer fact you can do it at all is kind of amazing all in itself.

Alexey Skobkin

@geerlingguy
This could probably be solved by Fediverse/ActivityPub URL schema. Then your instance could register itself as a web handler.

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do

Alexey Skobkin

@geerlingguy
BTW, glad to see you here. It was a good surprise for me to find you on Mastodon.

Dr. Quadragon ❌

@skobkin Yes!

And if you have multiple accounts (on different servers with different capabilities), ask the user!

Kinda like Android/iOS do when you want to send a piece of data or a file to some app. Or desktop OS's "Open With..." dialog.

@geerlingguy

Alexey Skobkin

@drq @geerlingguy
So we're in desperate need of yet another standardization.

Dr. Quadragon ❌

@skobkin Stuff like MIME types but for social services/Web in general?

@geerlingguy

Alexey Skobkin

@drq @geerlingguy
Just a schema standard for now.

It can be even universal schema like 'magnet' which isn't bound to BitTorrent only, so it could be used by ActivityPub and BlueSky at the same time for example.

Ténno Seremélʹ

@skobkin @drq Meanwhile Fedilab: wait a sec, pal, imma going to import that thing right away :3

// Not that the problem does not exist, but there are some solutions to the problem.

@geerlingguy

Alexey Skobkin

@tennoseremel @drq @geerlingguy
Megalodon is doing the same. But it's an app.

The problem in the OP is about "I've clicked on a link on %some_site_or_messenger% and found myself on some (not mine) Mastodon instance, but can't like/boost any content.

> but there are some solutions to the problem

It's all workarounds for now.

[DATA EXPUNGED]
Dr. Quadragon ❌

@th3rdsergeevich Irrelevant, because at this point there's *NO* standard for this.

@skobkin @geerlingguy

Go Up