mastodon
Better support for following pixelfed users.
Pitch
Currently, though I can follow pixelfed users from Mastodon, this feature is somewhat "crippled":
- pixelfed allows more pictures per post than Mastodon, apparently these additional images simply aren't displayed without any notice.
- pixelfed supports stories which don't appear at all in Mastodon and I have no way to even see the user makes use of these.
- pixelfed supports licenses (CC-BY-SA) and location attached to image posts, which isn't visible at all while looking at pixelfed posts from a Mastodon user interface.
Please consider ways to make this information visible in the Mastodon user interfaces, too.
Motivation
Currently, the ability to subscribe and follow users on other platforms is one of the big arguments for pulling people over to Mastodon and the fediverse. It's minor nuissances and inconveniences like these that really hinder this adoption and are likely to turn users away (once they learn that, though they can follow pixelfed users from within mastodon, they will lose a considerable amount of information this way).
Of these, I think the only one that makes sense to add is a "more pictures available" link that could maybe take you back to the original image. Extra metadata like license and location aren't really important to show on remote instances, you can always go back to the original instance to see them.
Stories would be nice, but it would require Mastodon to implement the entire stories feature, there's no way to "translate" stories into a Mastodon-friendly format without changing the UX expectations (e.g. ephemerality and separation from normal post content).
Of these, I think the only one that makes sense to add is a "more pictures available" link that could maybe take you back to the original image. Extra metadata like license and location aren't really important to show on remote instances, you can always go back to the original instance to see them.
I get your point but see two "issues" here:
- First and foremost, with the idea of visiting remote instances to see full data, users essentially will have to do so every time in order to make sure they're not missing something as (for stories) within Mastodon they don't even have a chance of seeing there's information they don't have access to as "followers" from wherever they are.
- Worse: This approach doesn't at all seem to work for private profiles and content. In this case, navigating to the web instance will require users to (a) have a pixelfed account to log in with and (b) be following the same users from that account too.
So at this point, it would mean falling back to the walled garden approach of requiring separate accounts per platform again, anyhow, or maybe it will be even more difficult to handle: For Twitter vs. Instagram, people know these accounts aren't capable of interacting with each other, as these are proprietary silos where exchange and interactions across these borders isn't desired. Exactly the opposite is one of the core salespoints of ActivityPub and the federated networks, and it also works - but just to some degree, and for users it is hard to impossible to figure out to which degree and what this kind of compatibility actually depends upon... 😔️
