That’s amazing. I guess I still have a lot to learn about the Fediverse. I didn’t expect the post url link would ping you but that may be because your username is part of the post url. I picked the first mastodon post that I enjoyed as an example.
- 0 Posts
- 4 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
I don’t really use Mastodon, but I jumped on a couple instances to check the process of finding the post on a different instance. The posts in mastodon again have a different URLs to the same post on different instances just like Lemmy does so I just I wanted to figure out how they did it. It was simple and intuitive.
e.g. I may be browsing a post on mastodon.social while logged in to mstdn.social account and want to switch to an account on mastodon.world before replying.
in (https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]/110678720030292635)
click the elipsis …
Copy link to post
This copies the link to the original post in its original instance (https://mastodon.social/@wonderofscience/110678719111063776)
Now I can go to mastodon.world and search the link we just copied. This gives one result which contains the post: (https://mastodon.world/@[email protected]/110678720000699504)
*Note: it seems you have to be logged in to the Mastodon instance for the search to work. *
Now you should be able to reply from that instance. I suppose these are the steps that the Fedilab takes for switching accounts.
I was scratching my head why searching this post from lemm.ee (https://lemmy.ml/post/1769528) wasn’t working for me. Then it hit me, the post original instance is based on the poster, not the community. There is even a Fediverse star that gives you the link to the original post which is actually (https://reddthat.com/post/326735).
You can actually search (https://reddthat.com/post/326735) in the instance that you want to post to and it will be found using the search bar. It’s just not as fast as Mastodon. I have convinced myself that this isn’t as big as a limitation as I thought, it just isn’t as trivial as a simple URL change.
I think the main issue is that lemmy urls for posts/comments are not unique to the federation, instead they are numbered by instance, so you have to search the post in the instance then open it up. It’s not a simple addition due to this. e.g. the url for this post is the following on 3 different instances:
I think it’s this. I was posting on 3 different accounts until I found one to settle in.