I’m often seeing links to posts on Mastodon and, when I click on them, they open in a Mastodon instance different from mine (I mean from the one where I have my account). This means that I cannot reply, boost, etc, that post.

The very roundaboundaboundabout way to solve this is to go to your instance and search/“explore” for that post.

Is there a smoother way to address this problem?

I found 1001 “beginner’s guides for Mastodon” online and after reading 3 without finding any solution, I decided to ask here.

A similar problem existed with communities (and still exists with posts) in different Lemmy instances, but luckily tools like the Lemmy Instance Assistant solve this rather smoothly with a click.

PS: sorry if this sounds like a rant – it isn’t. Just asking for info. I’m sure problems like this will eventually be solved in the Fediverse :)

  • snowyday@lemmy.worldB
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    1 year ago

    I’m glad you asked. This is one of the biggest challenges to fediverse adoption. We need a better way to handle this so the new users don’t have to figure it out — because most of them won’t

  • sab@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    The official Mastodon software tends to be a bit slow on these developments - the attitude seems to be the opposite of “move fast and break things”.

    Some third party front-ends (such as trunks.social) solve it nicely in my experience.

    • stravanasu@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      Thank you for the recommendation, I’ll try it out. To be honest I second the “don’t move fast if you have to break things” attitude…

  • Jupiter Rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu
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    1 year ago

    Right now, there’s no smoother way.

    There will be one when Mastodon introduces support for the single sign-on standard OpenWebAuth that was created along with Hubzilla. I’m not sure how likely this is to actually happen, but it’s planned AFAIK.

    • stravanasu@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      Had never heard about it, cheers!

      Edit: unfortunately it looks like it’s not open-source. I have some trust issues with close-source projects that handle my browsing.

      • andypiper@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        understandable! No problem, just thought it could be useful, but realise you should make those choices carefully.

  • EatALime@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t had this problem. Are people pasting links to someone else’s post into their post or is this from boosts? Is it quotes? I don’t think Mastodon has quote posts, but Firefish and potentially other Misskey variants do. Do you have an example? I primarily use Firefish instead of Mastodon so I am admittedly not the most experienced Mastodon user, but even when I scroll through my Mastodon account, posts and boosts open in my own server when I click them and I can star or bookmark or boost them myself from that page.

    I am curious about what’s happening exactly so I can understand it better, I hope my questions don’t come off as hostile.

    • stravanasu@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      Not hostile at all, thank you :) Indeed I asked this question because I suspected I was misunderstanding how to use the site. Here’s an example. A comment in this post:

      https://lemmy.world/comment/960056

      gives a link to a Mastodon post. The link I see is https://mastodon.world/@mwadmin/110654590632768079

      If I click that link, I do see the Mastodon post, but it’s on a Mastodon instance different from mine (https://c.im/). If I wanted to boost, favour, or reply, I have to open another tab/window, go to my Mastodon account on my instance, search for that post, and then I can boost etc. Let me know if this is unclear.

      Maybe it’s just because I use Mastodon via browser and not a 3rd-party app, as some comments here have suggested.