Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Homecoming for Mastodon 1.1

Jeff Johnson (Mastodon):

I found that the federated structure of Mastodon could make it ridiculously difficult to follow people, especially if you’re not on one of the biggest instances such as mastodon.social (which is often closed for new sign-ups). Whenever you’re browsing a web page on another Mastodon instance, you can’t simply click a button to follow someone, because you’re not signed in on that instance. You can only follow someone from your own instance, where you have an account.

The trick is to translate or redirect a Mastodon URL on another instance to the corresponding URL on your instance. The only reliable way I knew to accomplish this was to copy the URL and paste it into the search field on the web page of my own instance, but that method was obviously tedious.

His $1.99 Safari extension adds a toolbar button to automate this. I’ve found this very helpful, not only for following new people, but also for boosting posts from different instances after opening them from NetNewsWire into Safari.

Previously:

1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon

https://graze.canny.io/ offers a Chrome and Firefox extension for the same thing.

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