Cross-posting to Bluesky & Threads always shows shortened posts

Cross-posting
1

I have a micro.blog @jaffe with cross-posting set up to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads (the latter with the new tests).

Mastodon works fine. However, when cross-posting to Bluesky or Threads, the posts show up as “shortened” – i.e., with less text than the full post, and then a link to my blog.

This is, I think, the expected behaviour when a post is too long to fit in the character limit, but that is not the case for these posts. The problem happens with text-only posts, posts with links, and posts with photos.

I have checked the underlying jsonfeeds, and they don’t appear to be unusual.

A few important details:

  • I have a legacy cross-posting-only account, linked to a wordpress blog.
    • In fact, I have seen the post-shortening behaviour for one of my posts on the micro.blog version of the blog.
    • the wordpress blog uses jetpack for markdown translation
  • I sometimes post directly within wordpress, sometimes through the micro.blog apps, sometimes through MarsEdit on macOS.

Is this user error, a misunderstanding of the feature, or a bug? Anyone else seeing this behavior?

Thanks!

1 Like
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The legacy cross-posting is fine. It uses the same code. This looks like it might be an issue with posts in external feeds that have a title set. However, it’s odd that it’s working for Mastodon and not Bluesky or Threads.

When you post to WordPress, do you set the title, or is set automatically for you? Ideally for short posts the title would be blank in the JSON Feed. That way Micro.blog knows to treat it as a short post. If the title is present, it checks if it’s also the first part of the post content, and that might be failing in some cases.

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Hi @manton, aha, yes, I’m seeing that the titles in the jsonfeed are indeed set to shortened versions of the message text. I definitely don’t want this – I am making posts without explicit titles, and somehow they are being set here. But I don’t see titles in MarsEdit or even the WP editing screen.

… and I think I have figured it out: I wrote a plugin based on this discussion in order to change the “posts” screen to show excerpts in the title column when there is no title and I wonder if this could be responsible. I have deactivated the plugin. Although there do appear to be some caching issues (possibly both server and client side) the "title" entries do seem to go away (and I get empty <title></title> in the rss).

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Possibly related: Today I noticed that Threads posts are being truncated at about 303 characters.

I would not even classify it as a bug. It was unexpected behavior, but now that I know about it I can accommodate it.

I’ve been using Threads cross-posting since the beginning. I think I may have noticed this behavior before — I’m sure I noticed unexpected shortening on Threads — but I didn’t give it any thought until today.

2 Likes
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I also noticed the truncation despite it having a 500 character limit just like Mastodon.