Where a reader carries a post

A post gets read, and then it goes somewhere: into a toot, a message, an email to one person. Until now the reader did that by copying the address out of the bar. 1.6 puts a row of controls under the post for it — off unless share: names what you want, drawn in the order you name it.

share:
  - mastodon
  - bluesky
  - email
  - copy
  - system

What is prefilled, and what is not

The post's name and its address, where the target takes both. Facebook and LinkedIn take the address alone and read the name off the page. The reader writes the part that is theirs. bluesky, email, facebook, linkedin, threads and x are plain links, one address each, no script behind them.

Three that are not links

The fediverse has as many addresses as it has instances, and a page cannot know which one is the reader's. So mastodon is a button that asks — in a row that opens under the controls, in the site's own type — and remembers the answer in that browser afterwards. Nothing about the reader leaves the page; the instance name is kept where they typed it.

copy puts the address on the clipboard. system hands the post to the operating system's own share sheet, which on a phone is Signal and WhatsApp and Telegram at once, and on a desk is whatever the system offers.

Those three appear only where they can work. A browser without a clipboard API gets no copy button, a desk without a share sheet gets no system button, and a block left with nothing to draw hides itself rather than standing a heading over an empty row.

Why there is no Pixelfed

Pixelfed has no address a page can hand a post to. A button that opened nothing would be worse than none, so there is none, and the changelog says so under "not fixed, on purpose" rather than leaving you to wonder.

One new file

assets/js/share.js is a file every page now loads. On a site that never sets share: it does nothing at all; it is still a file, and a deploy that misses it leaves a 404 in the console. git pull, rebuild, deploy — and it is there.

The controls make no request to anyone until the reader presses one. That is the rule for everything the engine puts on a page, and this row is no exception: the share buttons of the web are usually the one thing on a page that phones home before you touch them, and these do not.