I’m entirely lost on something. Let’s say I have Mb crossposting to Masto and Bluesky, and Bridgy watching for replies. (1) Do those replies show up in my Mentions on Mb, and (2) if so, what happens if I then reply to those replies on Mb?
For Bridgy to copy replies back to Micro.blog, it needs to know how to find the original blog post for the cross-posted post. Micro.blog doesn’t include a link back to your blog unless it’s a longer post with a title, or a post that needs to be truncated, so currently those are the only posts that will work with Bridgy. I believe Bridgy is also able to discover this connection if the original blog post is marked up with the cross-posted info, but that’s not something the default themes currently do.
As for when you reply to those replies… No, those will just stay on Micro.blog. If you want to be able to reply back and forth to Mastodon, it’s best to use the fediverse support in Micro.blog instead of the cross-posting.
Sorry, a quick clarification: if you have the fediverse support enabled in Micro.blog and you reply to a reply from Mastodon that was copied from Bridgy, it will go back to Mastodon. The username will be different in this case because you have effectively two fediverse usernames: one for cross-posting and one for Micro.blog.
How do we make this default behavior for Micro.blog? (or at least an opt-in or opt-out?)
So, if someone replies to a cross-post from Mb to @drwho@myotherfedi.acct, it would show up as a reply on Mb, but a reply to that reply from Mb would come from @drwho@mymicroblogfedi.addy, say?
The first step is testing this in a custom theme to make sure it actually works correctly as I described. After that, yes, it should be added to all the default themes where it makes sense. It might possible to make it a plug-in too.
Exactly, it gets a little weird when using Bridgy to connect the two accounts, but maybe some people will prefer it. If you stick with cross-posting only, of course you can just sign into Mastodon and check replies there. And if you use the fediverse support in Micro.blog, it’s all integrated in Micro.blog so there is no second Mastodon account.
Got it. Sort of unrelated followup, setting aside Bridgy: am I correct that in cross-posting from Mb, what’s shared is basically the same as what would appear through native federation, meaning (for titled posts, obviously) the title and the link? No way to, say, have the Masto share be the excerpt and a link? (I’m trying to find a way to automatically share my posts to a Masto account but to display excerpt and link, rather than just title—or, in the case of Jetpack sharing, title, excerpt, link—because it would look more conversational.)
Cross posting is basically publishing what’s in the JSON feed for your Micro.blog. There’s some folks like @pratik who have been editing their feeds to generate summary/excerpts for sharing.
There are some subtle differences with the native ActivityPub/fediverse version versus cross posting. For example, cross posting adds links at the end, whereas the direct fediverse share has some support for HTML so you actually get things like your linked text being where the link is.
Good point @jsonbecker. One way to think about it is that cross-posting to Mastodon is basically sharing a plain text version of the post. But with native fediverse support, it shares an HTML version of the post with inline styles and links.