Make ActivityPub handles clickable in posts

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

The discussion proposes making ActivityPub handles automatically clickable within Discourse posts. tobiaseigen notes that currently, handles like @fediforum@mastodon.social are not hyperlinked, forcing users to manually copy and paste them into external ActivityPub platforms to view profiles. The user suggests implementing automatic linking to the corresponding profile URL, arguing that the necessary components for the URL are already present in the handle format.

However, Jagster raises a technical concern, questioning whether such links would remain functional when the content is sent via ActivityPub to the fediverse, implying potential compatibility issues with how external platforms interpret or render these links.

1

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:

@fediforum@mastodon.social

This should be possible to do with code quite easily, given everything you need for the URL is in the handle:

[@fediforum@mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social/@fediforum)

3 Likes
2

But it can’t be a link when sended thru ActivityPub to fediversum, I reckon. Instead it should handled proper way inside Discourse.