Support Mastodon Social Link Detection

[zicklag]

Right now we don't properly show a mastodon icon for social links to mastodon.

The issue is that you may have any number of different mastodon servers so we can't match on domain like we do for the other platforms.

We need to have the client try and fetch the /manifest.json or something else that will help us identify it as a mastodon server.

We could also allow the user to set a custom icon with an icon picker, which might be good.

@erlend-sh I'm curious what your thoughts are on custom icon / label for social links and it's UX. Custom Icons can have a nice UX maybe by making the icon preview clickable and open an icon picker:

Custom labels would be annoying and I'm feeling like that should probably be relegated to the normal links section. Maybe that is argument enough to just put any links that don't have icons in your non-social links.

[erlend-sh]

As suggested on chat, how about relying on favicons in this case?

As a temporary hack we could also just add the Mastodon icon for any profile with a /@username inside it, since that’s fairly unique to masto/fedi.

Custom icon picker would be nice but it’s a much bigger thing.

Solicited advice from fedi: https://writing.exchange/@erlend/113859654538675434

[edent]

DuckDuckGo has a free Favicon service. You pass it a domain name, it sends you the site's logo.

For example if soneone's social network is glammr.us, you can use https://icons.duckduckgo.com/ip9/glammr.us.ico

There are a few other services like this - some free, some paid. DDG seems most reliable to me. I use it for my blog.

[barredo]

You could call the webfinger of that domain with an example account as resource. Here's more info https://docs.joinmastodon.org/spec/webfinger/

For instance, if the user says "my Mastodon profile is https://mastodon.social/@barredo" (my profile), you could call https://DOMAIN/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:USERNAME@DOMAIN (eg: https://mastodon.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[email protected])

to get a json file with basic info regarding my profile. That doesn't tell you this is a Mastodon server, because other similar fediverse related software could use similar parameters, but it's a start.

You could also try to fetch the outbox of the user https://DOMAIN/users/USER/outbox?page=true (mine would be https://mastodon.social/users/Barredo/outbox?page=true and see if a mastodon json resource loads there. It should contain
toot: "http://joinmastodon.org/ns#" so you know it's a Mastodon server

[FenTiger]

Does nodeinfo help?

See eg here and here.

Not all Fediverse instances provide these endpoints.

[mediaformat]

Favicon is the most standard option, however if the instance has a custom favicon (retro.social) it will show that rather than the software which seems to be the intent. Nodeinfo will give you the software name, you could then use something like https://codeberg.org/WeDistribute/decentralized-social-icons