Just had a request for a "Share on Mastodon" button for a blog.
As far as I know there's no official "Share on Mastodon" button, but there are several third party options.
If you've used a "Share on Mastodon" button on your site, could you give your recommendations/experiences?
@feditips I made my own, along with integrating Mastodon replies and interactions. Code is here:
https://www.codingwithjesse.com/blog/add-mastodon-replies-to-your-blog/
You can now comment on blog posts on Coding with Jesse! I turned off comments years ago, because I was getting tons of spam. But recently, with my return to social media, I decided to integrate Mastodon to give people a way to comment on and interact with my articles.
@JesseSkinner @feditips I recently followed a different approach to integrate Mastodon with my static website, directly linking one toot (and its replies) to a post.
Have a look here on how I did it and a working example: https://danielpecos.com/2022/12/25/mastodon-as-comment-system-for-your-static-blog/
Jesse, I have a question about the privacy and consent implications of pulling the replies onto your blog:
Does a user know this is happening? Can a user stop this happening?
my intuition would have been that users replying on Mastodon need to know that there replies will automatically appear as comments on an external webpage, seeing as I might reasonably feel comfortable (as a hypothetical user) about contributing to a discussion on Mastodon, but not about leaving a comment on a blog.
1/
2/ there are then more specific questions that follow from that:
1. is it clear from the way that the comments are displayed on the blog that they were made elsewhere (ie does display reflect what user actively opted to do)?
2. is the decision on public/unlisted/follower only/DM that I made when replying in Mastodon respected in any way?
3.are my settings on search engine indexing respected as a proxy for the extent to which I want my words appearing outside of M?
In the context of how I've personally done it -
1. Yes, my blog does refer to discussing the blog post on Mastodon, and all the replies & interactions link to the author and to the post on the author's Mastodon server.
2. Yes, brid.gy only has access to fully public replies, so only those get sent as webmentions.
3. AFAIK that setting is just about having your profile searchable, not your posts.
thank you, that answers most of my questions!!!
(also, I am clearly not versed in thinking about consent in the context of technical systems, though I do have to think about consent a lot in my own work).
Hypothetical follow up, then: if 1. weren't the case, would it be possible to simply display my comments as if they had been made on an external webpage, and if yes, is that a consent issue, and if yes, what (if anything) would there be to mitigate against that?
seems to me its potentially both, but, for the moment, I'm trying to wrap my head around the fediverse behaviour itself as I clearly don't understand it yet!
apologies for my ignorance.
@markstoneman
The replies don't live on the blog; I don't have a database of replies. The blog is a static site. Bridgy, which I'm using for webmentions, says it handles deletes: https://fed.brid.gy/docs#delete
The OS or a registered app would need to know which instance you wished to share too? 🤔🤷♂️
@katafrakt It's a really terrible UX though. You need to do this for each site you share from, breaking a lot of the value of an easy share. And if you move servers, any you have used before now have the wrong server.
Also I just helped a friend move to Mastodon, and I told her the server she is on, but we just made a shortcut for it to be easy for her to go there -- if she is confronted with this prompt, I am pretty sure she won't know what to put.
Indeed not a good user experience. It's needs to be improved to help sharing from outside Mastodon and within.
A local app handing the requests and redirecting to the users chosen instance? 😕🤷♂️
Maybe a better UX would be for a third party intermediary site to exist (like mastodon-sharer.social). And the idea is that the button would share to that site. People could set up accounts on that site and configure which is the instance they want their sharing to be done for.
Then, every time they visit this intermediary site, it would have their sharing settings remembered, so it becomes one click at that point, from every source people want to share from.
For sure. Pros and cons. I liked another person's suggestion I saw for a client side installed app. That way they can centralize their Mastodon sharing within their own device, but the entire network isn't centralized. Win-win if you ask me. Not sure how that would translate to web though (but should work for iOS and Android).
@mattwelke The problem to me with a client-side installed app is it breaks if the app isn't there.
Not as much an issue for sharing, once you get wide distribution of apps, since anyone who wants to share to Mastodon can easily have that set up.
But for general sharing of links to posts, those need to work everywhere. It sounds like the solution may be an easy way to hop to your server through a mastodon: scheme which is maybe not terrible.
@katafrakt I filed a feature request for this that, not surprisingly, got shot down in flames. 🙂
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/22245
It's really obvious rough edge though that somebody is probably going to fix. For example, when/if they implement mastodon: for interop, I think it would be easy for anyone to provide a domain described in that bug that converts those into portable URLs. (And one could certainly do that today for sharing to Mastodon.)
@feditips there’s this one: https://share-on-mastodon.social
There’s also Wordpress (and probably other blog software) plugins.
@feditips For the current iteration of my blog, I have a button that prefills the link and mentions me at a share page for each post.
So the button on...
https://judahbrown.xyz/share/about/
...Would redirect to
https://toot.kytta.dev/?text=Check%20out%20this%20post%20from%20@[email protected]%27s%20blog!%20https://judahbrown.xyz/about
@feditips i just direct link back to my profile. not the most elegant thing but since i'm just getting back into blogging, i'm trying not to get too distracted by the endless tweaking i could do.
basically, if the visitor is so inclined, they can either send me a note through the web site or hit me up here.
my mom hasn't taken advantage of either option yet.
@feditips Just used the code from @JesseSkinner to add a Mastodon button to my site (replacing the birdsite button that was there before). Here's a sample page:
https://practopian.org/blog/hbowie/thank-god-for-elon-musk.html
Thanks!
@feditips prediction: there will never be a "Share on Mastodon" button because the ethos here seems to be against it.
@feditips My blogs use Wordpress and I've always used the Shariff plug-in to generate the share buttons I choose, including Mastodon.
The first time you use the button, it asks for your instance and then, presumably, stores it in a cookie.
Sharing to Masto is always going to be problematic because Masto isn't monolithic so the button has no idea where to send the user without asking for more information.
FediTips has moved!
Jesse Skinner
John De Costa
🇦🇶 Placebo Domingo
Daniel Pecos Martínez 
Ulrike Hahn
Mark R. Stoneman
Aurin Azadî
Simon Zerafa
Paweł Świątkowski
Dianne Hackborn
Ricardo Harvin
Matt Welke
Robert George 𓇳𓃀𓁹𓏏𓇥𓆓𓀀
b4tech
Koen de Jonge - SynQ
Whreq Jnnyobre
Eric Redegeld💻🏎️☀️🙋💖
Santi Raumdeuter 
sknob
Dr. Ryan Straight
palmdoc
Pocho.com
Mark Atwood
Andreas Kuckartz
Judah Brown
The1goit 
matlag
Haplogroup News 
Shannon
Michael Cervieri
Laser314
AZcoigreach
Pup Halvor
notes
Maybe Surely
Herb Bowie
Luigi de Guzman
Heshi
Douglas Phillips Books
Phil Landmeier
Richard 🏳️🌈
Bellison22