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I appreciate the conversation BTW.

“For email, it’s because it’s commonplace”

I think it’s more, what’s your e-mail address? Then there is nothing else really to trade between people.

Ask people what’s their handle on Fediverse… To which people get confused and then you ask if they’re on Mastodon. Then, maybe. Someone then gives their user@instance, some give just the user without instance and then I’ve had some users give me their e-mail…

I believe that confusion is mostly caused by just the login process (let’s just start calling it the fedi handle or something). The fact that to login to your account, you use an e-mail address, or just your user without domain on most instances. Compare to say Twitter where you can use your username, or most free consumer e-mail providers ask you to enter your full e-mail address etc.

“whereas I think the iOS way was only with registering custom URI schemes.”

Yeah, it usually requires having JS trigger it on the page but I didn’t think it worth mentioning.

“It may be a big risk to trust one entity to host said address, unless they’re someone universally trusted and heavyweight enough to keep it up for near-eternity.”

My overall thought is that ActivityPub was standardised through the W3C and they’ve traditionally hosted things like XSL Transformation schemas among other things, they could be an option; IANA also set aside specific domains for certain technical demands and maintain them which could be another entity that could be viable as an option.

“The “Web-based protocol handler” would be a ‘web native’ way of handling it, without requiring any installed app. In fact, it can be both: if there’s registered handler for ‘web+activitypub’ (for example), it could present that URL, if not, then present the landing page handler (which Android clients could intercept and handle).”

Kind of, Android URL app registration requires a particular domain and can’t just be applied to every domain with a certain URL structure. Using apps on Android feels very broken for fediverse links currently (some actually register A LOT of instance URLs to get around this).

But again; I don’t think that this one single facet is the significant reason behind people not understanding how to use the fediverse, I do think it creates a very unpolished experience though and that’s definitely something you’ve clearly identified.

“…A delete & redraft later: it would be nice if Soapbox had a Markdown preview… and not forget that a post was set to Markdown syntax, when delete and redrafting (which gets unset).”

Markdown wise:

• Totally agree on the markdown preview
• Markdown when converted to plain text really should could up wioth a nice ASCII alternatives, so we don’t need to manually add things like quotationmarks for Mastodon users.
• I changed my Settings to always compose in markdown because I keep forgetting.