Share links

Share links

Under each post and journal entry, after the permalink line, a Share row lists the targets in data/share.yaml. It replaced the "Discuss on Mastodon" links. The syndicated front matter map is kept as data and is not rendered. The detailed source notes live in docs/share-links.md; this page is the short version.

What a post shows

• The permalink line: the canonical address of the post as a plain, selectable link. It works without JavaScript and is the fallback for every button below.
• Plain share links, built by layouts/_partials/share.html from the post's address and title: Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Facebook, Hacker News, Pinterest and Email. Every value is percent-encoded, no tracking parameter is added, and each link opens in a new tab with rel="noopener noreferrer". Pinterest needs an image, so it appears only on posts with a headline image. Email is a mailto: with no address.
• Buttons (hidden until the script runs): Copy link, and copy-link buttons for Discord, Matrix and Lemmy, which have no documented share URL.
• A Mastodon button. Mastodon has no single share address, so on the first click it asks for your server name, checks its shape, keeps it in your browser's local storage (this site only) and opens that server's share page. A "Change server" button appears once a server is remembered. The Privacy page says this.

The post and journal pages also carry Open Graph and Twitter card tags, so a link pasted into a chat or a social network gets a title, description and image. The image is the post's headline image or the default brand card. See layouts/_partials/head-meta.html.

The one script

The buttons need /share.js, the third pinned script. It is under 1 KB gzip, hash-pinned in share.js.sha256, and allowed only on posts and journal entries (a page pattern in the allowlist, not one named page). The Content Security Policy did not change. The stored Mastodon server is checked again every time it is read, and a bad value is deleted. See Search and tags for how a pinned script is held to its pages.

Why the design is like this

• Plain links first. Anchors work with scripts off.
• No tracking. No parameters are added to the shared address.
• Every script is a decision. Each new one is a policy change with its own review. See Build checks and budgets.
• Source and date for every URL. data/share.yaml and docs/share-links.md record where each template came from and when it was read. Several are third-party and can change without notice. scripts/test-share.sh checks the shape of each URL, not the remote site.

Known gap

Lemmy has no icon (no clearly licensed glyph was available), so its button is text only.

Changing the list

Edit data/share.yaml (a template change needs its source and date), then run scripts/test-share.sh.