Peertube: WebExtension to enhance federated experience

[MayeulC]

Well, that's an idea I just got (I have more ideas in the pipeline, longer-term), and might be worth a discussion here.

Currently, if you land on a peertube page from a link, you need to replace the beginning of the URL to interact with it from the home server of your choice, which is a subpar experience.

Solving this issue might be worth a W3C standard, but for now, a web extension would certainly be a good way to prototype something that works well.

Currently there are two ways to store user settings:

• Cookies
• Local storage

Both of these are URL-specific, and giving websites unrestricted access to those would likely be a privacy issue.

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I would suggest a workflow as follows:

1. The user visits a PeerTube website
2. The user is prompted to choose whether to remain on it, or visit it with the identity of one of the other instances:
   
   
   
   • a list should be displayed, maybe like Google's profile list
   
   
   • but websites shouldn't be able to read it for privacy concerns
   
   
   • as such, it should completely be handled client-side, maybe in something like a permission dialog
   
   
   • maybe add an option to remember the choice
   
   
3. If the user chooses so, it is either (TBD):
   
   
   
   • redirected to his home instance
   
   
   • presented with the same interface, but every API call is directed to his home server instead.
   
   
   • this might make for a better user experience, while keeping the user's choices private from the host instance.
   
   

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An alternative to a webextension might be to proxy everything to a "multiplexer", which would be an URL like peertube-chooser.net, that would store cookies for the same purpose, and serve javascript to proxy the API calls. This might be simpler to implement, and work with everyone, but:

• Could be a bit less private, as some JS might read the resulting DOM, as far as I know
• would sort of defeat the purpose of a federated service if a centralised server is needed for co-ordination.

Of course, everything here can later be extended to other federated projects: mastodon, Matrix, diaspora, GNU social, etc.

[Chocobozzz]

Have you heard about peertubeify?

[MayeulC]

No, I hadn't seen it, thank you. Although it doesn't seem to fulfil every requirement I stated above, it seems like a step in the right direction, and is quite promising.

In the longer term, I would like to come up with a standard cross-browser API for that kind of optional feature (sort of how mailto: links are handled in Firefox, but less intrusive, and still supported by the browser itself by default).

[rigelk]

@MayeulC isn't it the goal of protocol handlers? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler/Web-based_protocol_handlers

As a side note, it is not supported among all browsers: https://caniuse.com/#feat=registerprotocolhandler

Mastodon implemented it for a few purposes, check if that matches yours: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/4511

[MayeulC]

@rigelk sort of. This is nice when you want a remote follow link, but not if you want the browser to be able to present a fallback.

Ideally, we would have something like:

<link href="web+peertube://video:da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701" rel="alternate" type="federation/peertube">

This is a random example, there are many ways this could be implemented. In the above example, this would need a simple adjustment of the specification so that web browsers offer to open the page with one of their protocol handlers, if there is any available.

Of course, the workflow isn't perfect nor completely clear to me, I think I just need to think more about this, and let it sit for some some time. Ideally, this would be a generic way to solve the problem, but more standardisation of the various ActivityPub platforms is probably something to look into.

Together with a webextension, more information could be added to the various links:

<a _ngcontent-c3="" routerlink="/videos/overview" routerlinkactive="active" href="/videos/overview" peertube-link="web+peertube://nav:videos/[email protected]"><span _ngcontent-c3="" class="icon icon-videos-overview"></span><!---->Overview</a>

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@Chocobozzz & co, go take your days off, you deserve them :D

[Chocobozzz]

See https://docs.joinpeertube.org/#/use-third-party-application for available browser addons

[MayeulC]

@Chocobozzz an alternative I since thought about in the context of Matrix was to actually use a protocol handler, as suggested by @rigelk, but also submit PRs to the various web browsers to add a webpage (similar to https://matrix.to) that explains how to join the network as a default protocol handler.