I could probably use a bit more detail, or an explainer, on federation of a custom domain blog.
My specific question at the moment is how to reference or provide a “follow this account” link on Mastodon or elsewhere that references the federated blog timeline?
From my preexisting (non-blog) mastodon account I can find and follow my own blog on mastodon by its “@me@custom.domain” name. The favicon even shows as its avatar. Yay!
I thought maybe I could add a link in my preexisting (non-blog) mastodon account profile mentioning “@me@custom.domain” but if I do, the link created instantly loads the blog at the custom domain, not the mastodon “feed” as expected. Puzzlement.
If I understand correctly, this is working as intended. Clicking the URL is supposed to open your federated blog. The reference to share for following your blog’s fediverse presence is @bradl@just-one-more.club, which needs to be pasted in the Mastodon search box.
Thanks, that does seems to be the source of my confusion. Searching by typing the reference directly into the search box finds it as expected and it’s how I found and followed it. If I try to provide the reference while ON Mastodon, for someone to cut-n-paste it, all the Mastodon clients I’ve tried turn that into a link which immediately launches them to the blog. It’s a pain on some clients to copy the text vs click the link. I’ll see if I can learn how to somehow prevent the address from being clickable on various clients, or munge it.
At first I was equally surprised but it kind of makes sense.
We may have a Mastodon-centric view of the Fediverse and expect links to user handles to lead to Mastodon-like profile pages. But every Fediverse platform supporting the ActivityPub protocol comes with its own design and structure, which may differ from that of typical microblogging or social platform.
Very true. I’d also mention that this is strictly a Mastodon issue, and we don’t have too much control over how they handle this, outside of getting them to fix the behavior.
But there are also certain situations where users won’t encounter this behavior. For example, I think if someone on your Mastodon instance is following the blog/account, clicking the handle will pull up the profile in Mastodon instead of sending people to the webpage.
Further experimentation has shown me that the primary issue (for me) was in the mastodon profile field. Moving the reference to a post-box (e.g., #introduction post) I can reference the feed directly by mention. That works for me! Thanks for helping me understand the landscape better. Cheers all!