Browser extension that lets you follow accounts on foreign Mastodon instances | Hacker News Reader

Browser extension that lets you follow accounts on foreign Mastodon instances

github.com

91 pointsshafyy32 comments

Not sure if I am missing something, but this is something I can do without any extra extensions installed? Out of the 27 accounts I am currently following, 20 are accounts from other Mastodon instances...

I do have to search for the account on my local instance to start following them instead of being able to click follow right there, but that is a minor annoyance

It is solving exactly that minor annoyance you mentioned.

Ah... fair enough. For me the annoyance is minor enough that I wouldn't be installing an extension that gets access to all the sites that I browse, but I get that for others it might worth it.

From the outside, it seems like an easy problem to solve but with all the multiple domains and the way federation itself works there is no quick/easy fix that doesn't bring other assorted problems into play

Right, it appears this extension is aimed at the minor annoyance.

Odd, I can just click follow, on hachyderm.io even if the followee is on mastodon.social. No annoyances.

I'm betting you're clicking the follow button on the profile at hachyderm.io/@user@mastodon.social and not mastodon.social/@user

It will never gain significant popularity with UX failures like this.

Does Hacker News have 'significant popularity'?

Not really.

No, but it doesn't need one. Or looking at it in at other way - as long as it is better than Slashdot and Reddit people will keep coming anyway - and that bar is freaking low.

This seems reductionist & rejectionist to me. If people have a reason to care, little impedances like this are not going to stop things.

In general this high judgementalism really should have a tiny smidge of humility & respect in it. That lacks. You could improve.

I disagree, it's little frictions like this that make it hard for newcomers to take the stage even when on paper they're better than established competitors. This is hackernews so obviously our population is going to be less likely to be significantly hampered by this, but I'm telling you for a fact that everyone in my family that checked out mastodon struggled to follow people that were on different instances, texted/emailed me about why they couldn't login on that instance, and have since stopped using it. Now I'm not sure if that's the only reason, but they all reached out to me about it and few about anything else, so it's definitely harmful for the ecosystem.

One of the things Tim O'Reilly used to say is, follow the alpha geeks.

If tech is interesting & compelling & there are some people there already doing the thing, people will overcome enormous barriers & learn lots to come participate.

Few of these systems are truly self apparent- all of them require enormous learning & training & sociation. But we dont see that because we so happen to have been using the same tech for a decade or two now, more or less. The "availability heuristic" tells us what we know is easy, and what we dont know is hard. This can deceieve.

Are Mastadon or the other activitypub systems really hard? Honestly I quite doubt it. But we are improving & making the experiences better over time. And more so, just as you were served as an in the know peer to bridge the Availabity Hueristic gap, the community grows & is better able to bring this knowledge to those who only learned how to exist inside the Walled Gardens.

Alas there's been ongoing press-back against doing the thing the web does, which would be to have a way to registerProtocolHandler with your fedi instance (& be able to quickly flip sites into web protocol mode).

One of the more recent WontFixes, citing previous issuee, https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14187

The current discussion is at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19679

For those that don't want to install a browser extension (or use an app), I wrote a bookmarklet that lets you toggle between viewing things in your Mastodon instance and a foreign one.

https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/imurray2/code/mastodon.html

Feels like this should be native to Mastodon. Is there anything preventing this from being implemented?

> Is there anything preventing this from being implemented?

Yes, normal browser security restrictions mean one site doesn't have the necessary access to another site. A browser extension can bypass these security restrictions (which also means you have to trust the extension's developer, since the extension has unrestricted access to all sites you open in your browser).

There used to be an oauth flow for interacting with your home instance. I dont know when they got rid of it, maybe 4.0?

You'd still need to type in (or select in some other way) your home instance. The instance you're browsing on has no way of knowing otherwise.

A one-ish off login with other big instances is a tolerable solution for me.

I would rather have feature allowing you to browse other instances from the UI in your home instance, so you don't need to go off-site for that.

It used to be. Before the 4.0 release (which was shortly after Musk took over Twitter), the follow modal was much more user-friendly.

You'd get a popup telling you to enter your remote username (with autofill enabled), which then would redirect you to your actual instance to then handle the subsequent authentication and following process.

Gargron for some reason scrapped this modal when releasing 4.0s new UI (and in addition the suggested new method by copy-pasting URLs breaks remote following support in Misskey and Pleroma since those don't resolve raw WebFinger links out of safety concerns).

I use Mastodon via pinafore.social, which lets me do that. The search feature can find users across instances, which is pretty useful.

For anyone on iOS, you can use this in the new Orion webbrowser: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...

Does this relate to the OP?

Quoting OP: "There is only one way to use FediAct on iOS: Orion Browser." https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct#:~:text=There%20is%20only....

Extension isn’t loading on Orion iOS for me. Anyone any luck?

I thought following Mastodon was against free speech, why else would Elon ban it

I wouldn't install a browser extension just for this. I think you can use a simple Twitter query[1] that will show you if your users mentioned mastodon links in their profile. Personally, the accounts I'm following are slowly moving out, so keeping track of the links is quite easy.

[1] https://twitter.com/search?q=filter%3Afollows%20mastodon%20-...

I think you misunderstood what this does. Because Mastodon is federated, when you visit a the profile of a user that's not on your instance, you cannot follow them with the click of a button. Rather, you need to log in to your instance and then search for their username. This exension makes it so that you can follow anybody with the click of a button.

I totally misunderstood the purpose of this extension. Now that you've pointed it out, it's clear that it's quite useful. I was previously manually entering all the users into the search box, which was a pain. I'm glad this extension exists to automate the process. It would be even better if Mastodon integrated something like this natively.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com