Problem

Suppose you read an interesting article at news.xyz and want to share it via Mastodon. You can of course copy the article's URL and paste it in your app or the mastodon web frontend. But this is too inconvenient for many users. They prefer a simple "Share via Mastodon"-button.

To make this happen the information about the article's URL has to be carried from news.xyz to your Mastodon instance. Due to the decentralized nature of the Fediverse it is unknown to news.xyz what your mastodon instance is. This is a main difference to centralized platforms which offer one URL like tweetbook.com/share as a target for sharing over that platform. However, for Mastodon (and other Fediverse services) each instance necessarily has its own sharing URL e.g. mastodon.social/share, chaos.social/share or whatever instance you chose to register. And there are thousands of them.

Traditionally, this is solved by a pop up dialog which asks you to type the domain of your instance. But, as above, many users find that too inconvenient (quote of one user: "UX from hell") and just cancel the whole sharing process. In total, this results in less Fediverse activity, which is undesirable.

Our Solution

Feditool Share is a static webpage where you can specify your instance (e.g. mastodon.social). This has to be done only once and is then saved in a cookie, i.e. locally in your browser (it can be changed or deleted at any time with one click).

Now, news.xyz and any other website which wants to offer a simple sharing button could use the feditool.uber.space/share link. A little javascript code of that page decodes the full URL, extracts the article-related part and redirects your browser to the correct sharing page of your instance (taken from the cookie).

The key improvement is: You only have to type/paste your instance once and then the sharing button works with one click (+ automatic redirection) for every website (not only news.xyz). This is then the same level of convenience as central platforms like tweetbook.com offer – but without disclosing information about you.

Status and Open Challenges

This project currently is just a proof of concept demo to generate some feedback on the idea. From the perspective of the author there are (at least) the following open challenges:

1. Improvement of the app (UX, error handling, browser testing, ...)
2. Convincing websites to use it as a sharing link
3. Establishing a trustworthy hosting to prevent future abuse
   • To be precise here: The potential risk is rather low. No personal data is collected and the instance information alone cannot be abused.
   • However, if the service should become popular then there would exist incentives to display advertisement or redirect to unwanted targets instead of the desired sharing page of you instance.
   • The existence of such a theoretical scenario might thus likely hinder the the adoption of the service by websites like news.xyz in the fist place and therefore needs to be addressed conceptually.

Idea for Further Improvements of Convenience

Redirection count down start value: