What I'm looking for is a simple FLOSS add-on for Firefox through which the address bar recognizes Fediverse-style account handles as such, i.e. it infers the URL that corresponds to that profile and opens it. (Or alternatively: It shows that handle on one specified instance, e.g. always from your Mastodon home instance.)

Inferring the URL is of course not entirely trivial, as it depends on what software runs on the instance; but perhaps someone has already put together a solution that works reasonably well... or you would like to make one yourself. Edit for clarification: Even coverage of only some ActivityPub implementations, such as recent versions of Mastodon and Lemmy, would be a great start if support for others can be added later on.

For people with experience developing Firefox add-ons, it would be great if you share insights about what functionalities one should use to execute the redirect.

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[–] libewa@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

How does Mastodon‘s „Open URL“ work then? It works with the URLs I get from Lemmy, so it does support some other software…

[–] JupiterRowland@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Mastodon internally converts it into something it understands, maybe using Webfinger.

That'd be one reason why Webfinger, which is not part of the official W3C ActivityPub spec, is a hard requirement for federating with Mastodon.

The idea behind this Firefox add-on idea appears to be that it shall work with any Fediverse server application, regardless of which one you use. Or it should be if it has "Fediverse" in its description. You should be able to use it with Mastodon or with Lemmy, but you should be able to use it with Akkoma or Misskey or Iceshrimp.NET or Hollo or Mbin or Friendica or Hubzilla or (streams) or Wafrn all the same.

But it already gets tricky if it has to support Lemmy (as in being on Lemmy) in addition to Mastodon.