When you setup your site with Bridgy Fed¹, it creates a dashboard with a form for others to follow you site. E.g. mine: https://fed.brid.gy/user/tantek.com
Copying that Follow form to your site sets up cross-instance following directly from your #IndieWeb site!
Starting with the Follow form markup on the dashboard, copy it and make any necessary changes for its HTML & CSS to fit in with your own, e.g.
<form method="post" action="https://fed.brid.gy/remote-follow">
<label for="follow-address">🐘 Follow
<kbd>@tantek.com@tantek.com</kbd>:<br />
enter your @-@ fediverse address:</label>
<input id="follow-address" name="address" type="text" required="required"
placeholder="@you@instance.social" title="Type your @-@ address" value="" />
<input name="domain" type="hidden" value="tantek.com" />
<input name="protocol" type="hidden" value="web" />
<button type="submit">Follow</button>
</form>
After adding the Follow form to my site, I added more instructions and screenshots to the IndieWeb wiki to hopefuly enable more developers to setup Follow buttons:
* https://indieweb.org/Bridgy_Fed#How_to_add_a_follow_form
See that section for a sample rendering of the form, and what happens when someone else clicks the Follow button on your site while they’re logged into a Mastodon instance.
They get prompted to FOLLOW you, and when they click that button, they get a follow confirmation.
A functioning cross-instance “Follow” button is one step closer to a universal cross-site “Follow button”.
This is day 19 of #100DaysOfIndieWeb #100Days, written the night after.
← Day 18: https://tantek.com/2023/019/t5/reply-domain-above-address-and-silo
→ Day 20: https://tantek.com/2023/022/t1/indieweb-eat-what-you-cook
¹ https://tantek.com/2023/008/t7/bridgy-indieweb-posse-backfeed
@elizabethtai.com (@liztai@hachyderm.io) Thanks! It took us a while to come up with #POSSE too! Both the concept and name.
Roughly conceptually described in a 2010-05-26 interview¹:
1. Publish on your own site, own your URLs, your permalinks, and
2. Syndicate out to other sites. Your text updates to Twitter, your checkins to Foursquare, your photos to Flickr etc.
A few months later in a whiteboard architecture diagram².
Then *two years* after that @willnorris.com (@will@willnorris.com) and I finally came up with the name/acronym POSSE!³
¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20130312135439/http://www.monkinetic.com/2010/05/26/tantek-celik-diso-20-brass-tacks
² https://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/5301870765/
³ http://tantek.com/2012/173/t1/posse-core-indieweb-approach
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