Now that I have given in to the fact that if I ever want anyone to read my long-forms I’ll have to go through Twitter, I am curious about the nature of cross-posting videos. Medium doesn’t do videos (or much of anything else useful, apparently); but, I definitely want my videos to pop up on Tumblr and Twitter.
Tumblr requires an extra step (replacing the your browser does not support video with the video) which is a little cumbersome but totally doable.
Twitter replacements require copying the text, deleting the tweet, and composing a new tweet with pasted text and the video.
The question, then, is whether the platform APIs allow for cross-posting video (in which case I lean on @manton for evolving the cross-post logic) or whether there is an API level barrier.
Side note: I am also playing around in my head with the idea of some form of HTML comment-based API from which platform specific data may be embedded into Micro.blog posts from which they could be parsed out for cross-posting (such as hashtags).
It should be possible for us to cross-post videos to Twitter so that the videos appear inline in the tweet, but for the initial version we weren’t sure the best behavior, so instead it always links back to the blog post if there is a video in it. (This assumes using Micro.blog Premium for video upload… Might be a little different or require changes if embedding YouTube or other video sources.)
I think we should revisit this, so happy to hear suggestions.
My primary use case is for my short critter videos, which I like to autoplay looped and muted to mimic the way I grew accustomed to seeing them on Twitter. Gluon does a decent job of handling them if you want to see what the Micro.blog timeline would look like.
I am not getting the link to post behavior for posts including video; but, I would be editing/removing cross-posts that did this anyway to have videos included directly within the target platform.
Side note: now that I am cross-posting to Twitter I would also be curious about stacking tweets into a thread (like I used to build up in drafts before tweeting the whole thread). This would be ideal for posts exceeding the character count but which do not have a title (posts with titles I generate an image for in order to have a nice Twitter card specific to the post).
This issue came up for me today, as I posted a short MP4 inside of a micro.blog post and then expected the Twitter/Mastodon cross post to have the video embedded but it instead had a link to the microblog post. Ideally in the future it would do the embed.
I don’t crosspost, but instead use the Micro.blog account as Mastodon option. My videos don’t show up in those Mastodon posts at all, which isn’t ideal for folks who follow me from there. They can’t even see that there’s supposed to be a video in the post. I’m starting to manually add a URL in those posts just so that Mastodon folks can see it and click, but it sure would be nice if videos were embedded or somehow automatically linked in that ActivityPub integration.
What are you using to create the video posts? Looks like your post has <video> with a separate <source> element, whereas Micro.blog currently uses <video src=""> and those do get sent to Mastodon. I’ll fix this to support <source> as well.
By the way, since MB interfaces with Mastodon directly using ActivityPub, how do edits work? Do changes made to posts ever make their way over to Mastodon followers?
