I've made a widget to make it easier for visitors to follow federated blogs and such on Mastodon. It presents a dialog to ask for their instance URL and confirm the account they are invited to follow, then sends them to a page on their instance to make it happen.
It's available for anyone to use; just link your visitor to https://eroosenmaallen.gitlab.io/fedi-follow/?follow=https://roosenmaallen.com/author/admin.
This is an initial release, it does just enough to be useful. For the future I plan to add:
- Styling, so you can send colour choices (and perhaps even link a new stylesheet? Considering potential connotations for that one)
- Error checking
- Account preview
- More than Mastodon?
This should work to follow any ActivityPub-federated site, like this blog; as far as I know it should work on any Mastodon instance; I have some research to do to see if I can readily support other Fedi platforms.
I've added it as a bare link in my blog's sidebar, but if there's interest I can put together easier ways to integrate it, with JavaScript sample code, possibly a WordPress plugin, React component, etc., or at least a link builder.
Feedback is welcome, as are bug reports, pull requests, etc., and as ever if this is useful I welcome tips at Ko-fi.
