Protocol handler?

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

rimu@piefed.social interesting idea... I know Evan has some thoughts about this as part of his ActivityPub HTML discovery project

https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-html-discovery/

I am not sure why they did not settle on protocol handlers but I've tagged him for comment

evan@activitypub.space evan@cosocial.ca

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

The concept sounds excellent, although there is fairly limited mobile support.

Since NodeBB is an installable PWA it would be definitely nice to have it supported there as well.

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@rimu web+acct

[die4ever@retrolemmy.com]

It's a good idea, but web+fedi or web+activitypub is maybe too broad to be useful? I wouldn't want a Lemmy post to open in Mastodon, and pretty sure opening a Mastodon post in Lemmy is impossible unless the post was directed to a community.

web+threadiverse could solve that issue but that's kinda hacky. Too bad (AFAIK) they can't be stacked like web+fedi+threadiverse with some kind of priority system.

There was a discussion about this for Lemmy but it was never implemented https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/3031

Maybe the real solution is to improve Lemmy and Mastodon so that they are capable of doing these things decently.

I was actually thinking of making a browser extension that handles this instead. Each Fediverse software could write something to window.fediverse or something like that, with tags for threadiverse, group support, micro blogging, etc. The extension could have methods to infer these values for existing platforms. But the extension could give a dialog box to redirect, based on your preferred instances for certain tags.

[die4ever@retrolemmy.com]

What does acct stand for?

[evan@cosocial.ca]

@Die4Ever

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7565

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@rimu

web+ap, which was proposed by Fedilink authors. To my knowledge, it is the most widely adopted proposal

https://web.archive.org/web/20250402041648/https://fedilinks.org/

(the main site seems to be offline now)

cc @SoniEx2

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

Are there implementors of web+ap? I'd be interested in adopting.

I assume the fallback behaviour is to just assume https?

[silverpill@mitra.social]

@julian Fedilinks website lists 3 MastoAPI clients, but the list is incomplete. I saw Fedilinks being mentioned in changelogs of other clients too.

There was also an Akkoma PR, it was closed by the author: https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/pulls/589. I don't quite understand the reasoning, perhaps @smitten could clarify.

[julian@community.nodebb.org]

The PR comments suggest that making the various changes to the backend were too large to justify, and a front-end only approach would be preferred? smitten@key.portend.place

It raises a good point though, where if you serve web+ap://, it's not understood by clients that are not aware of this scheme. If there were a way a client could communicate whether there is a protocol handler registered, then the server could tailor its response.