Please consider adding Open Graph previews to Micro.blog for more engaging and visually appealing shared content. It would greatly enhance the overall user experience and increase post visibility.
Strongly agree with this. It’s especially important with regards to content from ActivityPub sources (Mastodon, etc) as they often assume others have preview of what they’re linking. Right now I often just see mystery links with very little context.
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I’ll add another upvote for this idea. 
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I posted this after very recently coming back to Micro.blog, but after being here a while I kinda appreciated the more quiet nature of Micro.blog, including lack of preview.
I still think this is maybe somthing to consider, but I suppose it’s important to balance it with the quietness of Micro.blog which I consider to be one of it’s big selling points.
If implemented I think the design ought to be not to disruptive, and maybe it should be possible to turn it off.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. That is why I’ve resisted adding previews, because it can feel so busy. I do think we should have them as an option eventually, and maybe we can come up with a design that is more streamlined than other sites.
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Put me down as another person who is in no rush to see link previews. Three concerns:
- As noted previously, they can make the timeline super-busy.
- Often the photos that are chosen for articles are ugly, and then that ugliness carries over into the timeline. The Daring Fireball blog link previews just show the DF logo, and same for Techdirt. If I’m sharing a link to a news story, often the image will be a stock photo of whatever politician or celebrity is the main voice in the article.
- Tumbnails are unpredictable. Will the reader be able to see the whole headline, or only part of the headline? Will the reader see a different headline than they one they get after they click the link? Some sites, like the Washington Post, are unreliable whether and where they show previews.
I recently rediscovered that when I post a naked link to micro.blog, the server automatically shortens the link to (IIRC) the first 37 characters (I counted.) I’d like it even better if the link just showed the domain.
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What if we had a link preview sans images? Because I agree about the randomness of images. Most people wish posts with links stand out in the timeline, especially those with macro posts linking to their blogs.
The current UI prioritizes micro-posts (yeah, it’s micro DOT blog) or micro-posts with sometimes tons of photos hence the perception that Micro.blog doesn’t encourage longform posts (Dave Winer even assumed that long-form posts were NOT allowed on Micro.blog)
FWIW, I like the way Discourse forums handle previews.
My initial antipathy toward previews was visualizing how Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr do it. But those don’t have to be the only ways.
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Open Graph previews of cross-posted WordPress entries would be really nice. That could limit them to items under the user’s control. They could be opt-in. For those who ensure they have appropriate image and metadata in their WordPress posts, such previews would make cross-posted entries in a user’s micro.blog timeline look quite vibrant. If I’m missing a straightforward way which already exists to do this, I’m all ears (eyes?).
Seeing the way the redesigned kottke.org handles previews, I like it very much. Put me down as a “yes” to this feature—I’m changing my vote from “meh” to “yes.”
To be clear: I’d like these previews on my blog, RSS feed and newsletter. I have no opinion on whether the previews should appear in the timeline.
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Doing those previews on your blog, RSS, and newsletter is a totally different feature— that requires hitting each of those links and loading them at build time to grab their opengraph meta data (or at least at initial publish) and doing a lot of work for that inside of your blog itself.
That is… almost certainly not going to be a thing because you’re not going to want to have to do a network request for every link on every blog publish.
I think the only feasible way to do this would be app side upon pasting a link, which would only work in that app, and would result in asynchronously fetching data and then dropping in a bunch of HTML. And what do you about two links in a post? Inline links with text versus just a link pasted at the end? Etc.
Doing this on the timeline is… several orders of magnitude less complex in this case.
Interesting.
I’ve been playing with ChatGPT to automate link formatting for linklist posts. It works amazingly well. I tried it out on generating link previews and found the problem is (a) actually surprisingly simple and (b) not something I could get ChatGPT to do correctly.
I may continue working on this.
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