Hello! First time submitting a FEP myself. This one is for a feature Mastodon has had since July 2024, which is fairly popular among bloggers and journalists.
Often, the author of a website is present on the social media platform where the links to the website are being shared. However, usually there is no quick way to navigate to the author’s social media profile from the link preview. Being able to navigate to the social media profile of a website’s author from that website’s link preview is a win-win situation for the author and for the platform. This FEP defines a new meta property fediverse:creator which can appear in the <head> section of any website.
How would this feature translate to a single user instance?
I’m thinking of the case where we would rather have the linking site/instance embed the content as a quote. As more websites should become ActivityPub enabled or aware this seems like a solution for a transition period. I hope.
Thank you for the time of putting it down to paper though! And we will definitely look for a proper place to apply it in the meantime since the actual reality of the matter is, not everyone is ready for it yet.
The content attribute is to contain the WebFinger handle of the author's fediverse profile, i.e. username and domain separated by an @-symbol. A leading @ can be included and ignored when processing. This format was chosen for its user-friendliness, as this style of handle is what users would be used to seeing and typing when using most fediverse software.
This choice was criticized a lot when the feature was introduced. Meta tags are primarily read by machines, not humans, so user-friendliness shouldn't be a concern. Reliability, on the other hand, is worth taking into consideration. preferredUsername and the user part of a handle can be changed at any time. Actor ID is a more stable identifier and in my opinion is a better match for the fediverse:creator tag.