Remote Follow button?

At present WriteFreely federates properly with at least Pleroma instances, but following an instance running it has to be done manually through the search bar. Is there any chance of a remote follow button being added?

I think so.

The biggest obstacle for this feature is inventing a more user-friendly follow flow. I’d rather keep the current behavior than e.g. copy Mastodon’s UX and end up confusing people.

Also, part of inventing a better flow will involve developing it alongside Read.as, and making the two platforms work seamlessly. So this feature probably won’t happen before we’re able to spend more time focusing on that project again.

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Howdy, I came here to propose that WriteFreely implement FEB-3b86, which enhances and standardizes remote follows. I’m new on this board, so Discourse won’t let me post. So, I’m hoping this might be a good way to get this conversation started?

I’m a Go developer, and happy to try making a PR, if another pair of hands would help to get this going :slightly_smiling_face:

About Activity Intents
FEP-3b86: Activity Intents is a small change to the data published by WebFinger that would improve how WriteFreely connects to other Fediverse servers.

It is similar to the old oStatus “remote follows” but it is 1) works for any kind of Activity, not just Follow, and 2) has actual documentation. Implementing this FEP is as simple updating WebFinger results to include the URLs that let website visitors perform Activities on their own server (such as Follow, Like, or Announce). Then, other websites can use this information to display interactive buttons to take those actions.

I’d love to, but I can’t make new topics until I have more (karma?) on the discussion site. Is there some way you can let me post a top-level topic?

Thanks for the suggestion! This looks like a great path to take to start down this path. Please feel free to open a PR! Also, if you have questions or want to start any technical discussions, you can now create a new topic here (we had to restrict that for a bit after a wave of spam the other week).

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Yes, I’ll do that soon (once I’m through this next bandwagon release :slightly_smiling_face:)

I did some initial digging. When I open a new post on write.as, is there a URL parameter I can include that would create the initial page content? I think that’s what I’d need to use to support this. If that’s not there, I’m happy to take a shot at adding this, but I’m wary of just jumping into a new codebase and ripping stuff up.