How to see posts from another Mastodon instance in a smooth way in one's own instance?

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, (edited )

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

pglpm,
@pglpm@lemmy.ca avatar

Glad to see my question wasn’t so dumb, cheers :)

oyenyaaow,

fediverse don’t seem to acknowledge there are different forms of posting, and each of them had to be treated differently. Asking for multiple different interfaces for is a bit too much. But it is what is needed. Interacting with mastodon is what - a top post, it’s reposts, a user timeline, followed timeline, hashtags, these are things that do not exist in lemmy.

There’s talks of tumblr should join the fediverse. But how are two, ten, fifty posts chained together, each one carrying upwards to twenty tags going to be handled through lemmy. A post can be five hundred different chains and more than ten million notes.

/u/username get’s a lemmy user’s comments and posts in lemmy.
maybe /u/username/shorts/ gets a minimal mastodon feed enough to view and reply.

EatALime,
EatALime avatar

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.

pglpm,
@pglpm@lemmy.ca avatar

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:

lemmy.world/comment/960056

gives a link to a Mastodon post. The link I see is mastodon.world/

If I click that link, I do see the Mastodon post, but it’s on a Mastodon instance different from mine (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.

andypiper,
@andypiper@lemmy.world avatar

You can use the Graze browser extension that will help with this.

pglpm, (edited )
@pglpm@lemmy.ca avatar

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,
@andypiper@lemmy.world avatar

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

sab,
sab avatar

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.

pglpm,
@pglpm@lemmy.ca avatar

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…

CanOpener,

Try using a third-party app. I know Ice Cubes on iOS handles this really well.

pglpm,
@pglpm@lemmy.ca avatar

Cheers, didn’t know about this possibility!

jupiter_rowland,

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.

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