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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Hate to be trashing someone's well-intentioned attempt at making something great, but to offer a counterpoint: I'm not sure this solves a real problem?

If I'm a social media user on any of the websites this tool supports, it means I'd have a tab open for it/an already logged-in client within reach and it would always be quicker to copy/paste the current URL into it and post there rather than find/type my instance URL in the share widget and go from there (also, this would fail if I'm only using a client app and don't actually have a browser session on that social media website).

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Totally fair! This is an experiment - we'll see what comes out in the wash. The biggest impact I'm hoping for is to encourage more sites to remove their "share to Twitter" buttons.

Good on you for trying to clean up the internet. Btw, also consider https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/s... which would open the native system share UI (which may actually include any native client apps the user has installed).

> Totally fair! This is an experiment - we'll see what comes out in the wash. The biggest impact I'm hoping for is to encourage more sites to remove their "share to Twitter" buttons.

My bet is that your reason for building this widget ("The biggest impact I'm hoping for is to encourage more sites to remove their 'share to Twitter' buttons") is misaligned with what web owners want (publicity, exposure, discoverability, engagement) which you get by using the largest megaphone. X

I'm not sure if the goal is to not let people post on Twitter/X, but rather to not have a webpage with a share to Twitter button, to FB button, to Mastodon button, etc, but to have one button and when you click it, opens up the full list.

I see it almost as a way to do the share menu that mobile phones have. I tested the Share Openly button on my phone and it not only opened Threads and Bluesky much faster than the share menu on my version of iOS, it also added not just the URL but the title as well.

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