Mastodon – Simplified Federation!

Simplifies following or interacting with other users on remote Mastodon instances in the Fediverse. Basically, it skips the "Enter your Mastodon handle" popup and takes you directly to your own "home" instance, saving you from cumbrously entering your Mastodon handle again and again in that input box when you click on a “Follow”, “Retoot”/“Fav” or other remote interaction button on another instance. 😄

Idea by @akkes.

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In action…

Why?

You may wonder why to use this browser add-on. But actually, it's easy!

You do not need to enter your Mastodon account handle anymore! (except for login 😉) This makes interacting with remote instances much simpler.

Additionally, this add-on makes sure to keep your Mastodon handle private. It will never expose it to any third-party site. Therefore it does not – literally – enter your Mastodon ID into the input field you normally see, but basically "skips" this page. For the technical details, on how this works, see How does it work? below.

How does it work?

1. It intercepts any remote interaction popup/request.
2. It tries to get the toot/account you want to interact with from the "Enter your Mastodon ID" popup.
3. for remote follows: It get's the account to follow from the URL.
4. for toot interactions:
   1. It gets the local toot ID from the URL.
   2. It sends an additional web request to the remote server to get the remote toot ID.
      Alternatively, it does try to get the remote toot URL from the "Enter your Mastodon ID" popup when it is shown/rendered.
5. Afterwards it redirects you to the "remote_follow"/"remote_interaction" endpoint of your own Mastodon instance directly, thus skipping entering the Mastodon handle in that "foreign" page.

Due to the fact that it does not block loading of the "Enter your Mastodon ID" popup, it may – especially in the case of "toot interactions" – happen, that the "Enter your Mastodon ID" popup is shown anyway for some seconds. After some time, it should be redirected though. If it really fails, this behavior ensures you still have a fallback to be able to manually enter your Mastodon handle.

Note for new Mastodon v4 instances, this is not enough. It also needs to inject some code into the website and modify Mastodon instances. See the release adding compatibility to see what is done in detail.

Other Fediverse instances

Note this add-on also include (partially limited) support for redirecting other Fediverse instances to your Mastodon instance. There, it may use different (or similar) methods for getting information about the user you want to follow.

Note, however, it only triggers when a redirect/loading of an URL specific to a Fediverse type occurs. As such, it e.g. cannot “intercept” small text-fields, where you can enter your handle, inside of a page.

Here a short description on how it is done:

• for GNU Social: It can get the user from the URL, if the URL is /main/ostatus/nickname/<username>.
• for Pleroma: If /main/ostatus is accessed, it tries to get the the username from the referrer. If not possible, it tries to scrape it from the website.
• for Friendica: It can get the user from the URL, if the URL is e.g. /main/remote_follow/<username>.

Contribute

You can easily get involved in this FLOSS project and any help is certainly appreciated. Here are some ideas:

• 📃 Translate this add-on into multiple languages!
• 🐛 Fix some easy issues and get started in add-on development (or just try out the development version)
• 💡 Or check out some other add-on issues (or translate them).

Or, in any case, support us by spreading the word! ❤️