Yeah, so I ended up tinkering with a fediverse-flavored webring site generator this weekend.
It mostly works the way I'd imagined it? I forgot I had so many accounts, but they're handy for test data.
Now, to see if I can polish it up a bit more and see if some folks want to join a webring 😅
https://fediverse-webring-demo.glitch.me/profiles/lmorchard_hackers.town/
The general idea is that you could assemble a list of fediverse addresses - say, folks who like building long Furbies or playing the ukulele.
Someone could ask to join and you can add them to the list. They get a page on your site.
If that someone adds the link to that page on their profile, they'll appear as verified by your site.
When someone clicks through that link to the page, they can wander through a ring of other folks who also asked to join.
The fun part, I hope, will be to make this thing easy to copy so anyone can generate their own version with their own list
This little project has a long ways to go, but here's the github repo and I just added a button to remix it on glitch (we'll see if I got all the parts right for that)
@melindrea I figured a Glitch project would be quick to get the thing running in a tinkerable form, but I also want to get it building with a Github Action to Pages. Not at all hard, just filling out the config file paperwork really
@melindrea Hopefully that code is easy enough to get into. I kind of over-engineered the async nodejs stuff since it has a concurrent queue to fetch fediverse profiles. But, it sure can fetch things fast 😅
@melindrea I think async stuff in JS has gotten a lot better over the years. But then sometimes, you just gotta write a Python script :)
@grisha Yeah, I pitched a similar idea to a few folks on several occasions when I was at Mozilla too. But, it never seemed to land anywhere and I'm not really a successful socializer of ideas
@grisha I have long had daydreams of an alternate reality where Mozilla had as much of an investment in creating the web as consuming the web, but 🤷♂️
I’ve had this little ninja bobble thing for almost 25 years and many house moves, some cross-country. It’s been broken a handful of times, including last week. I’ve managed to glue it back together every time, so far. Too bad I don’t have any molten gold lying around
I’ve also had these Office Gods figurines for close to 30 years. Caffeina, Computa, and Surfus. Little bits have broken off and been glued back on over years, too. Haven’t found them for sale for a good while, though they pop up on eBay now and again.
Hmm, I wonder if I could get decent enough scans of these Office God figures to gin up 3D printable models for them? Thoroughly bootleg but 🤷♂️
I think there were also Office God figures for Faxus (fax machines), Copius (photocopiers), Filus (files), and Hernia (overwork). But they seem to go for weird prices whenever they appear on auction sites
@maya Oh nice, that looks rather keen!
@SvenDowideit @KathyReid I would like to keep tinkering with this thing and get it into usable shape for this sort of list curation. Shouldn't be too hard to add a curator's note to included profiles, feature some on a timely or rotating basis, etc.
I'm also scratching my head at verification / consent / mutual links - that is, if a person includes a link on their mastodon profile to their page in the curated list, that can be a useful signal they agree to being included in the list.
Oof, this is such a not-good UI for cross-server interactions on Mastodon. Who wants to copypasta into a search box that may or may not do the desired thing?
Really makes me want to build a browser extension to finesse this between home & away servers.
I also miss the old behavior with a pop-up that asked for your home server name before just going ahead and executing the fave or boost or follow. I'm assuming there were problems with that model which drove this change, but ugh.
@darius Yeah, I think that's the old behavior I'm thinking of. It would ask for your preferred home server and (IIRC) save the choice, so future interactions with that server would seem to do close to the right thing
@annika :oof: Yeah, I think the old dialog at least saved your response (profile address) and semi-automated the rest so future attempts went faster. This is just the same handful of distinct steps every time
A few folks have clued me in on this existing browser extension. Looks like UI changes for 4.0 busted it because they're forced to employ hacks.
What could be even better is if Mastodon actually officially supported a browser extension that (with permission) clued an away server in on a visiting user's home server for interactions. The extension manages the choice and maybe proxies to the away server API, the server posts messages to the extension for interactions. Could be relatively seamless.
(Like, really, this should be the job of a User Agent - i.e. the browser)
@rafial In a browser extension, you can listen for messages from a public web page. So, you could build some methods where a remote web page can negotiate with an extension (if installed) to do some useful things with user permission. Like reveal home server choice, proxy calls to home server API, etc
@rafial so even with an extension, there’d be a series of buttons to click at least the first time for permission flow, but it could finesse that for future interactions
@mav yeah, a lot of extensions can be nefarious, but an extendable browser is really handy
An example of this sort of browser extension & page interaction would be Firefox Color, which I worked on a bunch of years ago.
Without the extension, you can play around with Firefox themes in a web app UI.
With the extension installed, the extension accepts messages from the page to modify the current Firefox theme, acting as a narrow proxy to an in-browser API with the web page as the UI. (The extension itself offers no UI)
@potch I think the old pattern that the Mastodon team removed in 4.0 was kind of that, except in a pop-up. You'd type your home server address and go through a permission dance before the fave / boost / follow applied. They decided copypasta/search was easier (but I don't like it)
@hellsop Well, once you're working in extension-land, I think it can work as a full-fledged API client like an app via OAuth and all that fun stuff
As seen in a local little library on a walk. Had no idea Dreamweaver was still a hot topic
@e_er1n AtariWriter is my favorite
(okay i lied, I really liked Facemaker back in the day)
@hypescam Yeah, that's a lil secret handshake 👁️
@e_er1n I've got an Atari 800 and an AtariWriter cart, but can't actually remember the last time I tried firing it up!
Got an ancient todo-someday list item to figure out how to export text from that thing to a PC. Managed to do it with an Apple II and a C64 awhile back for writing little things.
