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metabolist / metatext

A free, open-source iOS Mastodon client.
https://metabolist.org/metatext
GNU General Public License v3.0
727 stars 102 forks source link

Provide a way to browser a user’s profile+toots #119

Open mirabilos opened 2 years ago

mirabilos commented 2 years ago

Sometimes I want to see what a user wrote. Going to their profile, by default, shows me the information my own instance has about that user, which, in general, is 1 toot (the one from which I arrived at the user), 0 followers, 0 followees.

It would be nice if I could then proceed from there to browse that user’s profile on their home server. Pinafore does that by offering a link, but I think one can do so much better (especially as MetaText is said to be able to do read-only browsing of other peoples’ homeservers): render them locally, and if I want to interact with that, do the whole “copy/paste the ID from the browser URL, submit that to the search button on my own instance, wait for the answer (sometimes has to search twice or thrice until the data is loaded), then interact with that locally” thing automatically.

gil commented 2 years ago

I've posted a similar request, but your solution would be even more elegant.

masto commented 1 year ago

I have been waiting for any mastodon app to do this. It seems such an obvious thing, since they all require this complicated dance of finding the person’s profile and “sharing” it to a browser, if you’re lucky. (I came here to report a bug that share doesn’t seem to work on iPad, but found this first)

Having an transparent “see data from their server” without having to actually browse to their server would be a huge usability win.

mirabilos commented 1 year ago

Christopher Masto dixit:

Having an transparent “see data from their server” without having to actually browse to their server would be a huge usability win.

Not to mention the traffic saving…

gil commented 1 year ago

The problem, I think, is that you can't call an API to fetch someone's profile from another server. Hope that I'm wrong, though! So this can be implemented nicely without requiring to scrape their profile's HTML.

masto commented 1 year ago

The problem, I think, is that you can't call an API to fetch someone's profile from another server.

My assumption why the available clients are have mostly the same functionality is that they start with the Mastodon API and put a nice skin on it. There are unauthenticated calls you can make, and some clients support that (like Metatext's "Browse" mode). But because fediverse, there's no guarantee that a post came from another server that's a Mastodon instance or supports the Mastodon API. I'd still be happy with it working the 98% of the time when that's the case, or even an "iframe" experience that makes it easier to get there than navigating a share sheet.