The discussion proposes making ActivityPub handles clickable in Discourse posts to improve usability. tobiaseigen notes that handles like @fediforum@mastodon.social currently appear as plain text, forcing users to manually copy and paste them into external platforms to view profiles. They suggest automatically converting these into clickable links using the domain information embedded in the handle.
Jagster raises concerns about how this might interact with federation, suggesting it should be handled internally by Discourse rather than altering the federated output. tobiaseigen responds that the feature should work regardless of whether the ActivityPub plugin is installed and highlights existing formatting issues with federated posts. Jagster further suggests a potential option where non-federated views show links while federated ones use standard handles, or questions why actual links aren’t used given Mastodon’s limitations on mentions.
Finally, tobiaseigen shares an example from Nextcloud showing how confusing the current state is for cross-platform interactions. They emphasize that requiring users to paste full URLs creates too much friction, hindering the adoption of sharing federated handles within Discourse communities.
In some communities I am in, I am noticing that people are starting to refer to ActivityPub handles in posts, but unfortunately these appear like this:
@fediforum@mastodon.social
They are not clickable, which means if you are curious and want to see if you want to follow the handle, you have to copy/paste the handle into your ActivityPub site (e.g. mastodon) and click to go to the handle’s profile page.
Would be much nicer if they were automatically formed into clickable links, like this:
I don’t know how important that is or if that has to be related to this feature request at all. You can refer to an activitypub handle on a site without the expectation that the activity plugin is installed.
There are alot of formatting issues with federated posts. Unfortunately, not all Discourse markdown is supported an comes across looking pretty garbled. This I think could be handled by the plugin.
I don’t know how hard is to code a option where non-federated shows a handle as a link and federated ones use handle as a link insode Discourse and at same time federate using normal handles. Or if it plays any roll at all.
But why not use actual links when it is impossible to mention someone in Mastodon side
Just came across a topic Where to meet Nextcloud users at Mastodon? - 🎉 Events & meetups - Nextcloud community with a great example of how messed up this is currently in discourse. Would love love love for this to get some love, to facilitate more interlinkages between people in the fediverse and the discourse communities they are part of.
The last two posts in the topic are classic examples, see screenshot below. @irdi is an internal link to the discourse user themselves. @rskikuli would be an internal link too but there is no user with that username. That user was clever enough to paste the URL to their federated account, but that feels like too much friction/effort to really get the sharing of federated handles to catch on.
