Cross instance follows/retoots. What is the best way?

victualsquid

So, if you follow a link to someone's Mastodon you get their instance's website. Assume it isn't yours.
If you try to follow or something them you get a pop up where you should copy their full name and paste it into your own instance's website (or vivaldi panel explore subtab).
On Firefox I use the "Simplified Federation" plugin to automate that process.
There are some Chrome plugins, that probably work in Vivaldi but I don't have the chrome experience to judge which is the best one.

But, I do think that Vivaldi can and should provide this sort of functionality out of the box. Especially with their recent push for mastodon.
Or did I miss a hidden option to activate this behaviour? Or did the vivaldi team make a statement on if they want to add this functionality in the future?

Pathduck

@victualsquid Hello and Welcome to the Vivaldi Community

Just use the search box and search for [email protected]

In some cases just searching the user name works, but not always - because of instances and indexes - so better to include the instance name as well.

victualsquid

@Pathduck Entering things into the search-bar feels like even more effort then copy pasting into the search bar for me.

I am looking for method with lower effort.
The workflow you are implying for boosting something you opened from a webpage link to a foreign instance.

Click boost, get the error message reminding you that you are on a foreign instance.
Open your mastodon panes, switch to the explore subpanel
Type in the username and find the account
3b) Type it in again in full, if it wasn't indexed.
Click through to their account.
Scroll in their timeline to find the message
Click boost

And you can not imagine someone wanting to shortcut that.

That is honestly too much effort for me, which is why I use a plugin for that.
So my workflow in Firefox is:

Click boost on the foreign instance, let the plugin do the rest.

My main question was, if Vivaldi is planning to add that functionality in the foreseeable future, or if I have to hund down a trustworthy chrome plugin.
Or, I suppose a feature/plugin that redirects links to foreign instances to links to open them on my home instance. If that is easier on vivaldi that would also answer my question.

Pathduck

@victualsquid said in Cross instance follows/retoots. What is the best way?:

Entering things into the search-bar feels like even more effort then copy pasting into the search bar for me.

The search field on Mastodon, not the search field in Vivaldi. You can follow directly from there.

My main question was, if Vivaldi is planning to add that functionality in the foreseeable future

I doubt it, this works fine for most users.

luetage

@victualsquid Try this ☛ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fediact/lmpcajpkjcclkjbliapfjfolocffednm?hl=en-US / https://github.com/lartsch/FediAct

victualsquid

@Pathduck No you can't. And it doesn't work fine, which is why the plugins to do exactly that are so popular.

Here is a link to a toot, on a small instance you probably don't use:
https://kolektiva.social/@victualsquid/109528981238074612

Imagine you want to boost it or reply to it with an explanation of how many clicks it takes you to send the reply.
Try to do that by "entering the name into the search field on Mastodon", which is the webpage you are looking at, which is the kolektiva instance.
I know that you can go through the 6 step workflow I posted. Or do the same on a different browsing tab pointing to your instance instead of the vivaldi pane.

Or you can install a plugin, which I am planning to do.
Or, I suppose you can vow to never interact with any mastodon user by following a link from an external website. Which seems to be the official Vivaldi position?

Pathduck

@victualsquid I understand the problem, but no I don't think Vivaldi has any plans of making this easier. That is I'm guessing - I don't know because I have zero inside info from developers.

Or, I suppose you can vow to never interact with any mastodon user by following a link from an external website. Which seems to be the official Vivaldi position?

That's really jumping to weird conclusions from very little data

Install your extension if it makes things easier for you I guess?

luetage

@victualsquid You are reading so much into this seeing bad intentions everywhere. Vivaldi made a vanilla Mastodon instance which has no special anything unless you count a few additional emoji. All the work was on the server side. Mastodon integration so heavily lauded is only a default webpanel and bookmark. Mastodon looks exactly the same in Vivaldi, if you load it as webpanel yourself.

All of this meaning you have to request better integration over different Mastodon instances from Mastodon directly, or you simply use the extension I linked. It’s the most popular right now.

sushubh

@victualsquid This was slightly better on Mastodon 3.x series. There was an option to enter your own instance url and you were forwarded to a follow user popup. There were some security issues with this flow iirc which is why it was changed to current format which is too manual.

I have a solution that would work on desktop browsers. Browser extension is one way as someone already mentioned. I personally use a bookmarklet which works wonderfully.

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

This bookmarklet is great as it works on both profiles AND posts. They are redirected to your instance where you can follow user or like/boost/reply on posts. Last time I checked, Chrome apps did not work on posts.

Create an instance changer bookmarklet here.

Not a solution. But I do not think Vivaldi can do anything about this as they have zero control over the Mastodon software. Gotta live with the issues that exists because of the federated nature of the Mastodon platform.