Cross-posting to Twitter, Medium, Mastodon, and more

Including alt tags has been on our radar for a while and I hope to prioritize it. Requires some under-the-hood changes to how we’re using the Twitter API.

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Brilliant, I forget them quite often but trying to get better.

I would like more control over how posts get cross-posted to Twitter.

I want to have a title on micro.blog but also have the beginning of the post to be in the tweet (possibly without the title). I think this will increase traffic from Twitter to micro.blog too.

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It should be noted that the Medium crossposting feature does not work at all. Is there anyway Medium will let us fix that or should we consider removing that feature?

I didn’t realize that Medium cross-posting was broken. Everyone else seeing this? If it has been a while since Medium cross-posting was enabled, you may also want to disable/re-enable it, which will update the authentication information in Micro.blog.

All these work for me. My Micro.blog post cross-posted to @tbc@mindly.social on Mastodon, tbc0 on Twitter, tbc0 on medium.com, and tbchambers on LinkedIn.

Big bug! When cross-posting to Mastodon, microblog strips out an external link that I included in the original post, and it also does not link back to my original post on micro.blog. Example:

The original, on micro.blog, contains a link to a vox.com article.

I’m disabling cross-posting for now, until this bug is resolved.

Related: Can the post length on the ActivityPub stream be increased from the current 280 characters to 500? I know that Mastodon =/= ActivityPub, but I know of no native ActivityPub service that supports fewer than 500 characters. If micro.blog for activitypub supported 500-character posts, I might not even use crossposting, and just boost my ActivityPub posts from my Masto account instead.

Thanks!

I think it’s Masto doing the stripping of the hyperlink. I’ve been keeping track of when Masto will support Markdown but so far, no luck.

That’s an interesting Mastodon issue on GitHub, thanks @pratik. There’s a lot to digest in that and I have opinions. :slightly_smiling_face:

I think this bug is actually a new problem in Micro.blog when we expanded truncation to 500 characters for Mastodon cross-posting. I’m working on a fix.

Also for ActivityPub, yes, that should be increased to 500 soon.

And I see on news.micro.blog that this is fixed. Thank you for the prompt action.

Cross-posting feature update: Manton Reece - Adding per-post cross-posting to Micro.blog

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When I cross-post a link to a long post to Mastodon, even if there is a photo in my post, it doesn’t show up in the link preview. Is this a Mastodon issue or some setting I haven’t gotten right on Micro.blog?

Example from yesterday: Halsted M. Bernard :prami:: "Habit and mood tracking in my Hobonichi Techo: ht…" - social.lol

Example earlier: Halsted M. Bernard :prami:: "Libraries are under attack. Stop scrolling past t…" - social.lol

I think it may be a Mastodon issue. I see that the original post has solid opengraph and twitter meta data, which is what should be used to pull in those images for previews.

Looks like it’s an open bug: OpenGraph Images Load Inconsistently · Issue #24118 · mastodon/mastodon · GitHub.

I just tested crossposting to LinkedIn, and micro.blog adds a back link even when the post is < 280 chars. Seems like a bug.

You’re right, for some reason we made LinkedIn different than the other services and the URL is always appended. I can’t remember why! I’m going to disable that for shorter posts.

Is Medium already fixed?

It is not working here, I am importing my old posts from medium though, not sure if this is the problem for me

I believe Medium’s API is down: https://medium.statuspage.io/

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It worked now, it was really a medium problem, the API is back

Is there a way (besides linkbacks) to link to the different versions of my post from my blog? That way folks on the platform can more easily reshare it?