A Share Button For The Social Web

spaduf@slrpnk.net to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 108 points –
Share Openly
werd.io
13

It’s pretty cluttered with all those Mastodon instances. Would be nice if there was one Mastodon button and your browser remembered the instance you were sharing with.

Like lemmyverse.link which they could definitely use in that tool. edit: no probably not but see below.

edit: in fact, there's Mastodon Share that I think does this.

edit2: some discussion of that here.

It’s beautiful!

It's a pity they don't have comments on their blog because it would drastically improve their idea.

Now all we need is a Lemmy Share tool and a Mastodon Link one so both sides of the difficulty with Fediverse traffic are addressed. At least for those two. I imagine if the authors of the two tools swapped notes, they could sort this out.

This is a use case for a browser extension imo. never understood the point of having share buttons built in to a site, esp for services I don't use.

With an extension the user has a smoother, customizable UI - and no need for the web developer to do anything except provide a shareable url.

The issue with an extension ls is it requires an install, getting everyone to install one extension is a hard task.

Won't speak for anyone else but I won't install any extensions. The stores don't have basically any disclosure of what they're doing or what permissions they have.

Also they're used for fingerprinting.

No uBO? No Adblocker at all?

uBo is for chumps. Pros use AdGuard on their network 😉

Yeah an extension is no more trustworthy than the source providing it, network level adblock which you can monitor completely is probably the correct route

It might help to have the extension developed/endorsed by mastodon and to have all mastodon instances subtly nagging you to install it.

Also this is only needed for desktop, on mobile web sites can use the OS's built in share functionality through the web share api

Yeah however for mass adoption this is a terrible idea, there is already the extra step to choose an instance versus a regular social media that is just one link and one button.

I know for people like you and I choosing an instance isn't that big of a deal, nor is an extra extension (though i try to use as few as possible) but for a regular user it might cause issues.

On Android Firefox, you can just use the share button from the browser context menu for that site.