So, PieFed’s way of retrieving a post that you’re viewing on a “wrong” instance is quite slow for the user. You press the icon with the magnifying glass, scroll to the bottom of the page, read texts on both of the buttons, choose the correct one (Retrieve post), then wait for the page to load – which is suprisingly slow, then paste the URL in the field and press enter, and then wait for the next page to load and still have to press a link.
What I’m envisioning is that if I’m viewing a page such as https://sopuli.xyz/post/32069389 , I could just write “Piefed” in front of the URL, making my browser load the “Retrieve remote post” page with the relevant field prefilled with the URL after that word. So, if the URL says “Piefed https://sopuli.xyz/post/32069389”, I then get to the page with a link to https://piefed.ee/post/85356 , enabling me to click that link and get to comment on the post.
This would streamline browsing threadiverse a LOT, because it keeps happening that I find links that throw me to “wrong” instances. Sometimes they are in threadiverse comments, sometimes* they are out there in the big internet. It’s an annoying chore having to click a button and wait and click a button and wait and then click a link and wait again. Anything that streamlines this experience would be very welcome!
So, is there a way to make this happen on Firefox? (Also, could we please get the field for writing the URL to fetch right on the Piefed UI? Such as, click “Communities ▾”, then throw the link into a field on the bottom of the thing that opens that way (and maybe get to the requested page immediately without having to click an extra link first?)
*) Still very rarely, but it has already happened!
I can make it so that web+pf://sopuli.xyz/post/32069389 opened it on your home instance. Would that do?
It has to start with
web+just because - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler and I put pf after that because PieFed.Sounds mostly very cool! How would it know which one is my home instance?
There’s going to have to be a ‘register protocol handler’ button (except not those words, something normal people would say) somewhere in the UI. When that’s clicked it’ll run
navigator.registerProtocolHandler("web+pf", "https://piefed.ee/?to=%25s");so your home instance is whichever instance you clicked that button on.Looks like this idea only really works on desktop browsers, mobile ones don’t do it - https://caniuse.com/registerprotocolhandler
Are you primarily on a phone or a desktop?
On Voyager(Android e/os) and desktop Firefox(Ubuntu) quite equally.
So, in this context the sensible answer is: Desktop.
That would be quite something
You could do this with an extension, yes.
I’m pretty sure you can find an extension to do this (most likely one of the redirector extensions). If not, then you’ll have to develop one yourself.
It’s good enough for me at the moment, but I don’t have to retrieve remote posts that often
This is the kind of thing that apps handle well - I viewed your post from Voyager, and just had to click the
sopuli.xyzlink to get is resolved to my instance.For the web browser experience: that link used to be a bit more visible (you can currently also get it from community sidebars, but it used to also be in post sidebars too). Someone complained though, and it was removed from post sidebars, so I assume they’d have the same complaint if it was re-surfaced again. You could just bookmark it, of course.
The page itself shouldn’t be slow to load (it’s a very lightweight page that’s not doing anything until you click ‘Retrieve’). It doesn’t immediately redirect you to the post because the assumption was that you might want to retrieve more than one post at a time.
That said, if you’re already viewing a page on the ‘wrong’ instance, then being able to change ‘https’ to ‘web+pf’ and have it work sounds cool (although it looks like Chrome makes highlighting ‘https’ into a 2-click experience).
