Rework the Mastodon profile field as "Fediverse", and social links in general

(To follow up on https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/space/community-meta/post/mastodon-link, a 7 month old thread)

I love the social links feature, but the Mastodon field has a small conceptual issue: it hardcodes https://mastodon.social/ as a fixed prefix, the way the X or Facebook fields hardcode x.com/ and facebook.com/. That's the source of the problem: Mastodon isn't a single website like those are. It's open-source software that anyone can install on their own server, and each independent server (called an "instance") is its own community with its own URL. mastodon.social is just one of around 10,000 active instances, hosting only ~348k of the +10 million Mastodon accounts out there.

The analogy is email: you wouldn't hardcode @gmail.com in an email field, because people are spread across thousands of providers. Mastodon works the same way, it's decentralised by design, and a member's profile URL is https://instance.tld/@username.

It'd be lovely if the field were renamed "Fediverse" and simply accepted a full URL with no hardcoded prefix, the same way the Website field already works. That would also cover the rest of the Fediverse, but not Mastodon, such as Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy, Friendica, etc. in one go. 💛

Related: there's also an older request in comments on my initial post for fully customisable social link fields (user-chosen icon, label and URL), which would cover any profile: eBay, Discord, Threads, Patreon, Canva, Behance, niche marketplaces (example I'm on ricardo.ch marketplace), or any profile (ie theWP.world, WPspeakers.com) and so on. See these comments by Ryan Alier, Artur Abakarov and Ceez Vision on my initial post https://community.wpmanageninja.com/portal/post/mastodon-link?comment_id=33604.

Worth doing both: the Fediverse fix addresses an existing default-on field, and custom fields cover everything that isn't built in.