Support for Pleroma as home instance (removing the @ prefix)

[xnorxnor]

Background

Whenever I click on the "follow" button on a mastodon instance, I get the error message "Error fetching user".
The URL looks like this:

https://my.pleroma.instance/ostatus_subscribe?acct=@user@mastodon.instance

When I remove the leading @ everything works and the follow-request is sent after I click "Authorize".

Proposed solution

Add an option to remove the leading @ in front of the username, so that the URL looks like this:

https://my.pleroma.instance/ostatus_subscribe?acct=user@mastodon.instance

Additional context

I am using pleroma.

[rugk]

Okay, so it is likely because you are using Pleroma. In such a case, i would propose to

• somehow just detect that the home Fediverse instance is not Mastodon but Pleroma and then do that "remove @" automatically. (If you or someone has any easy technical way – just an API call that is certain to be a mostly stable API e.g.) – for that, feel free to share that.
  Because I think an option to remove the prefix in the settings would not be good UX-wise and complicate stuff. People having Mastodon instances would click it and break their workflow etc. etc. This has to happen as automatically and – as such – as conveniently as possible.
• Also some Readme/doc/add-on text can be added to mention that Pleroma as home instances should also be supported then (as said it is unsure whether it may break in the future, so please be not too strong wording it).

Because – just to note that – of course Pleroma is not (yet) supported as your home instance, this add-on is called “Mastodon – Simplified Federation“ hinting the main Fedi software I developed it for was Mastodon and I cannot guarantee or test that it works with Pleroma e.g.

That all said, I am very happy you have tried it out and it even (nearly) works. And as I believe in federation and different ActivtiyPup-compatible software solutions I am very happy to get PRs (or even hands aka people) helping to implement (and maintain 👀) such a thing.