Mastodon – Simplified Federation
addons.mozilla.org
addons.mozilla.org
A plugin can read everything on every website you use. Your bank statements, your emails, which videos you watch on youtube, to whom you talk on Twitter and what you write with them, what you search on Google ... everything.
A bookmarklet can only read what is on the page on which you invoke it.
As far as I understand it, all that has to be done is something like:
document.body.innerHTML.replace(/<some_regex>/,'<some_string>')
@someone@someinstance.tld
<a href=https://yourinstance/web/@someon@someinstance.tld>@someon@someinstance.tld</a>We already have the system in place for things like Camera, Mic, and Location access. Why not extend that to anything an addon can do?
It’s how I run grammerly, which is a descent enough grammar checker except I never want it to correct my chat posts, or GitHub comments.
And on the plugin page for Grammarly, it says it gets "Access your data for all websites":
javascript:url=document.querySelector('link[type="application/rss+xml"]')?.href ?? 'None'; alert("RSS found: "+url);{}https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/code/mastodon.html
It's maybe easier to just use a separate app though, and avoid the faff of separate webpages entirely.
I don't understand why it's so hard for everyone to just have their own blog that is twitter-sized posts and you follow the people you want or don't.
No need for censorship or filtering because you simply don't follow people you find offensive?
No need for ads because it's your own app/data.
The problem is there needs to be an edge cache of each post and storage/bandwidth isn't "free" (just cheap these days).
The app/data is either entirely on your phone or browser.
I guess the thing about twitter/facebook is people want "discovery" and to profit off it by self-promotion. So it's like those drones in the sky no-one asked for, it's someone being obnoxious for attention and profit.
Just like usenet had its first spam sooner or later.
comments. either you destroy UX, or you suffer intolerable levels of spam, or you roll your own pseudo captcha (“please enter the name of the original grass-type starter pokemon to comment”) that only works as long as your blog stays small and niche. and whatever you choose brings a bunch more hosting complexity compared to the low-barrier-to-entry static site generators so popular today.
Instead make it "opt in"
The same way people browse posts to respond to, people can browse people to allow comments.
Friend requests and all that.
In the current world, especially post-2016, there is a greater than 50% chance any person (or bot) openly allowed to comment without approval is going to offend.
Unless you are in a closed community, in which case all the twitter models are unnecessary anyway.
if so that’s the UX element i was talking about. i follow like 200 people: i’m not gonna create 200 accounts for that.
(i don’t mean to degrade your work: it’s always cool to see what people build when solving a problem they’re passionate about.)
Account management is admittedly one of the weak parts of Haven's UX right now, but everything needs to be source-initiated or else spam is an even bigger issue. (That was my previous experience trying to do this on Wordpress). I've got ambitions of adopting IndieAuth and building Haven as an IndieAuth identity (IndieAuth is like Oauth, but you sign is as your domain instead of a user @ google/facebook/github/whatever). This would let account creation be more of a whitelisting process--just paste the names of the people (people identified as domains) to which you want to grant access, and authentication is handled by their own domains.
The first may be a Ruby on Rails problem (although I am not sure), possibly exacerbated by the decentralized layout of Mastodon instances. The second seems to be a fundamental design problem.
It seems to me that the original idea of Mastodon was that people would want to participate in communities that focus on specific themes. Many instances are aiming to serve people who are interested in one particular thing. Because of this, finding people and posts on other instances is harder. But reducing my interests to a single dimension is not how I used to use Twitter, so this is a major usability problem for me.
I’m not interested in any kind of community/network/discovery effect. I know which people I want to follow so I just want to find them, be fairly sure it’s really them, and then only read their tweets and retweets.
In other words, just stay on Twitter! Why’d you move to mastodon to begin with?