Boris Mann
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
FediTips has moved!
As a non-developer, what I don't understand understood is this:
The copy-and-paste method is pretty reliable for opening any kind of Fediverse link, on any app and the web clients too. If it finds it's a Fedi account, the account appears.
It shows they have the capacity to recognise them as Fedi links.
Why can't the same check just be applied to all links clicked on in the posts, and if they come up as Fedi links to display them as such?
Boris Mann
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.
🧵/4
Boris Mann
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)
🧵/2
Boris Mann
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
🧵/3
Aslak Raanes
@thisismissem How should this work with activtypub that links to itself?
Eg. if I link to an article https://notiz.blog/2023/05/19/happy-birthday-fediverse/ on @pfefferle's wordpress blog, should the client/server act as if this link is an activtypub instance and show it as an activtypub post, while while the link in that post itself will redirect as an ordinary url opening a web browser?
Emelia 👸🏻
@boris @feditips for point 1, Mastodon is now planning on rewriting the links in the Web UI to go through server-side redirection: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26917/files
I suspect this sort of logic could be rolled out to clients too.
Perhaps via link previews we could indicate if the link resolved to an Account or Status.
Emelia 👸🏻
@boris @feditips I think you're talking of two different things here:
1) client behaviours when opening links (URLs) in the app, such that the user gains an interact-able experience when visiting links to other fedi software.
2) Behaviour for fetching link previews (these are currently handled by fedi implementations, but does need a way to communicate an initial value via activitypub, but has security risks). Client's probably shouldn't be requesting link previews directly from the URL.
Boris Mann
Ok, so when apps check a link, we’d like to show it in app, making it consistent UI, and easy to favourite/boost/bookmark/follow ActivityPub actions (there are more!)
While we’re at it, we parse OpenGraph and/or Twitter preview info and grab preview text, images, maybe even embed a video or audio player.
Maybe that’s one way we can make things better?
Lean into some of those web preview standards and make … all links more awesome when browsed through ActivityPub clients.
🧵/5
Matthias Pfefferle
@thisismissem @aslakr @boris @feditips I think it means that links that have an ActivityPub representation will open in the WebUI instead of redirect to the site. That would lower the distraction of switching between UIs. I like the idea.
Emelia 👸🏻
@aslakr @pfefferle @boris @feditips honestly, I'm not sure. I don't think I have enough knowledge to answer this question, and it'd likely be best raised as a question on that pull request.
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