Conversation

Notices

1. Boris Mann (boris@cosocial.ca)'s status on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023 02:44:05 JST Boris Mann

   • Fedi.Tips 🎄

   Testing how links to posts from different flavours of ActivityPub servers work in mobile apps with @feditips

   The “good” experience is that apps check to see if the link is an AP post, and slides it open in app if it is.

   When it opens in app, users can favourite / boost / reply, visit the user profile and follow, all very seamlessly.

   This is the default, great experience for those like me that are native mobile app primary for their Fediverse usage.

   🧵/1

   • Boris Mann (boris@cosocial.ca)'s status on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023 02:44:03 JST Boris Mann

     in reply to

     • Fedi.Tips 🎄

     So you’ve got a link to what you think is an ActivityPub enabled item - either a post or a profile.

     You can paste this link into your search interface*.

     Ivory is bad at this, Mastodon, Ice Cubes, Toot! are good at detecting this, letting you find and follow Lemmy, PeerTube, MicroDotBlog, probably WordPress in the future.

     Mastodon native app is good at search…BUT pretty much opens everything in browser 🤦♂️🤷♂️

     *This “paste into search” is the expert flow on web front ends

     @feditips

     🧵/3

   • Boris Mann (boris@cosocial.ca)'s status on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023 02:44:04 JST Boris Mann

     in reply to

     • Fedi.Tips 🎄

     The bad experience (and the default in a browser interface), is your app can’t tell that a link is an ActivityPub post or profile, it opens in a browser window in app or in your mobile system browser, and…

     You’re not logged in, so can’t interact with the post.

     And you’re faced with a completely different UI than browsing in your app.

     You might be able to use search to interact with it (see next thread post)

     @feditips

     🧵/2

   • Boris Mann (boris@cosocial.ca)'s status on Sunday, 17-Sep-2023 02:44:17 JST Boris Mann

     in reply to

     • Fedi.Tips 🎄

     Why? WHY??? Well, because there’s the Mastodon API, there’s the ActivityPub backend spec, and there’s a ActivityPub Client spec.

     Mastodon is widely deployed and “easy” to check for, so that will work most reliably.

     And, every client app dev writes their own link checker code: different programming languages and licenses is one reason that it can’t be re-used directly, although documenting how to fingerprint different types would be a good first step.

     @feditips

     🧵/4