When you setup your site with Bridgy Fed^1, 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" alt="fediverse address" value="" />
 <input name="domain" type="hidden" value="tantek.com" />
 <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
→ 🔮


^1 https://tantek.com/2023/008/t7/bridgy-indieweb-posse-backfeed