I’m going to register a protocol handler, so links to anywhere on the fedi will be opened in the user’s home instance.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler
Has anyone already done this and if so what was the prefix you used? We might as well all use the same thing. I’m thinking web+fedi.
It’s a good idea, but
web+fediorweb+activitypubis maybe too broad to be useful? I wouldn’t want a Lemmy post to open in Mastodon, and pretty sure opening a Mastodon post in Lemmy is impossible unless the post was directed to a community.web+threadiversecould solve that issue but that’s kinda hacky. Too bad (AFAIK) they can’t be stacked likeweb+fedi+threadiversewith some kind of priority system.There was a discussion about this for Lemmy but it was never implemented https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/3031
Maybe the real solution is to improve Lemmy and Mastodon so that they are capable of doing these things decently.
I was actually thinking of making a browser extension that handles this instead. Each Fediverse software could write something to
window.fediverseor something like that, with tags for threadiverse, group support, micro blogging, etc. The extension could have methods to infer these values for existing platforms. But the extension could give a dialog box to redirect, based on your preferred instances for certain tags.Yes an extension might be the only way to get something happening on mobile browsers.
It would be helpful if there was a convention for what endpoint to call to ask an instance to convert a url to it’s local equivalent, to replace what navigator.registerProtocolHandler does. Otherwise you’d have to hardcode it for each platform.
On the other hand, most mobile fedi usage would be using an app, not browser. Couldn’t app devs hardcode something?