The importance of fedilinks over MastodonRedirect

[SoniEx2]

so we've previously talked about fedilinks and that's how MastodonRedirect ended up adding fedilinks support yeah?

well anyway... we know you can't do much about the stuff we're bringing up here, but we're not sure if there's a better forum for us to bring it up in...

we believe the changes google has made to links since android 12, in particular how those only really work for "verified" apps (aside from some community workarounds), are exactly why we need fedilinks. consider: accepting the new thing and patching over it is exactly the kind of concession that allows google to take further steps in entrenching it further. meanwhile, fedilinks could push back in the other direction - tell google we're not okay with this, and that we're bringing back the old experience to everyone, but making it even more open. at the very least, google has so far not taken any steps to break fedilinks.

but fedilinks must be implemented at the link-open-originating app level, because we call for a fallback mechanism based on a wildcard URI scheme, which apps cannot bind to at the OS level. at best, MastodonRedirect can implement said fallback for web+ap only. (this would be nice to have, tbh.) personally we don't actually know any android app developers who would be willing to care about google's attempts to lock down the web, but we like to believe there are many out there who just don't really know they could do something meaningful about it. fedilinks support is an effort the community could take to push back against this stuff, and keep the web - and the app ecosystem - open.

do you think you can help us with this effort? would you be open to joining us?