I just had that problem when you browse to a Mastodon post and ⭐️ it, or try to follow someone. The choreography is clumsy, and the kind of thing that will hinder mainstream adoption of ActivityPub.
acct is IANA official and used behind the scenes with webfinger. It’d be dead-simple to enable browsers looking up an app to handle acct: URLs: an ActivityPub client.
It’s trickier to think of how to handle posts, given the discussion about Lemmy/Mastodon interop… and the ActivityStreams spec has a dozen object types! But I think I’m going to want only as many clients as necessary, and one sounds great, so I’m interested to hear what people are thinking at an infrastructure level
For Octopus… Octopi is just plain incorrect, it assumes an incorrect loanword origin, even if it is the most common pluralization used.
Octopus does not come from Latin which would result in octopi. It comes from Greek, so the correct plural should be octopodes.
The English standard pluralization would still be Octopuses though, and most comprehensible all around without having to explain the whole thing to a new person. In the end it’s all about being understood over anything else.