I just had that problem when you browse to a Mastodon post and ⭐️ it, or try to follow someone. The choreography is clumsy, and the kind of thing that will hinder mainstream adoption of ActivityPub.
acct is IANA official and used behind the scenes with webfinger. It’d be dead-simple to enable browsers looking up an app to handle acct: URLs: an ActivityPub client.
It’s trickier to think of how to handle posts, given the discussion about Lemmy/Mastodon interop… and the ActivityStreams spec has a dozen object types! But I think I’m going to want only as many clients as necessary, and one sounds great, so I’m interested to hear what people are thinking at an infrastructure level
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the modality differences between microblogging and forums, and still working out my thoughts, but I definitely agree that generic solutions end up failing everyone.
I’d like to believe that today’s practice isn’t yet so cemented that we can’t aspire to better. I think there’s a lot of interop work even among conceptually aligned projects – there are a couple of FEPs i haven’t digested yet, eg FEP-1b12: Group federation (as well as, I just found, one about URLs)
I think the targets I’m looking for are a unified feed that can fan out to specialized clients for detail, and a system that embraces the power of links with minimal friction. EDIT oh, and maybe something that makes it easier to follow specific people across different modalities without having to rediscover them – although maybe that’s adjacent to the topic of this thread