How it would work: Check a box marked “threaded cross-posting” in the web editor, below the text of a post, down where the categories and cross-posting choices now live.
If checked, each paragraph goes to Mastodon and Bluesky as a separate, threaded post.
Paragraphs would have to be under 300 characters, and each paragraph could contain no more than one link.
I’ll just say I’d personally hate this and never click the button. Sorry— I want you to go to my blog, and I don’t want my micro.blog to be purely a posting engine to other places that does so in a way that makes it possible to not even know the real site exists.
That said, I’m sure others might like that. It just feels like treating micro.blog more like Buffer or Croissant (which are not for me).
Valid. I don’t claim to possess true way to blog and do social.
I don’t care if people come to my blog. I want them to be able to read what I write and see what I post on whatever platform they choose and do it with minimal manual cross-posting on my part.
I hope to see both ActivityPub and the AT Protocol support longform posts in some native fashion, and Micro.blog adopt that standard, and everything will be more smooth. But until then, every solution is unsatisfactory.
This is a feature that I’ve been thinking recently, too. As a user of Croissant app, it would be nice to be able to do something similar straight from micro.blog post editor.
However, I think this is surely one of those double-edged sword type of features that would be cool to see, but which might bring too much complexity to the product itself. Just the maintenance of this, in a way that things don’t break wonderfully when social media platforms change things from their end… ouch. And then there’s micro.blog timeline itself. How would that adapt to this?
In an ideal world (from my personal perspective), of course I’d love the users (of the platforms I cross-post to) to click through to my blog and read my post(s) there.
However (from their perspective), reading the post in threaded form on their chosen platform and engaging with it there is almost certainly preferred for most. Clicking through to a website is something that many just don’t like to do anymore. Plus, those link posts tend to get deprioritized on certain platforms if compared to “native posts”. So there’s that too.
But I don’t have the answers to this either. Not sure if there is a right way to do this even. I like what Mitch said about native support for longform type of posts in ActivityPub and AT protocol. That would be sweet to see. Let’s hope something like that will come to live at some point. 
One challenge is that there has been little take up/interest in ActivityPub land of some things that Manton has tried to spearhead-- servers communicating what features they support such as whether likes and reblogs are supported, and what they do not. You would want a standard to say something like “I know how many characters this instance permits per post” since there are people who have modified the allowable post length for their AP/Mastodon server. But without a solid standard, Micro.blog can’t suddenly realize “you can accept a full post”.
Additionally, many more characters is still not a “full post”-- how do you treat post content like multiple in line images, HTML embeds, and other features that do not work? There’s only a subset of HTML and content permitted even if you have 50000 character limits on an AP server. So there is no clean way of knowing “post this native” when the source (your blog) can post things that the outbound service cannot handle gracefully.
There may be some possible improvements here, but I broadly think that your blog is the wrong tool to use if your intent is “native cross posting of content meant for social media consumption”. Services like Buffer and Croissant are made for that-- and only allow your content to do things those services understand. Cross-posting your blog is much more “sharing that this content exist on a website” and much less “permitting a single interface to post lots of places natively”. That is a distinct problem that is hard enough on its own and doesn’t mesh well with “rich content however I want it on my own site”.
Absolutely. Seems like a reasonable request for a standard. I hope they come around and add it at some point, hopefully sooner than later.
Yup, it’s complicated for sure. Plain text is quite easy, but anything else… it gets tricky fast. I guess we just need to wait and see how these standards mature. It’s probably too soon to even try to implement something like this, would just cause a major headache 
Yeah, you’re probably right. I guess what I’m personally after with this is some better way to connect one’s blog to all these AP/ATP supporting services. Just sharing / cross-posting a link post (with “preview card” or not) feels… outdated. Almost like the standards themselves could use some love to support us bloggers who just want to share our stuff to world 
Now that I think about that, Telegram has (or had, not sure as I haven’t used it in few years) this Instant View type of feature: https://instantview.telegram.org/. That’s something that could work sweet if these other services would support something like this. 
Let’s see what happens!
This feels a bit like AMP, which failed pretty miserably. I think the idea behind Microformats is partially that it is significantly easier for other systems to parse the content of a page if it wants to, but it has not seen adoption by these platforms.
I think I’m just old, and I don’t find clicking on a link outdated at all.
I go back and forth on the issue of whether to post natively to other platforms, or just use Micro.blog’s native cross-posting and focus on writing and photography.
Every solution I’ve found is unsatisfactory.
The social web needs a model similar to podcasting, where folks can publish on Micro.blog, WordPress, Ghost, Tumblr, Mastodon, BlueSky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads or whatever other platform they prefer, and other folks can read on whatever platform they prefer, and everything is readable in native format. Dave Winer calls that textcasting.
Instead, we seem to be replicating proprietary silos but using open protocols, which is better than proprietary silos with proprietary protocols. But it’s far from ideal.
We have that. It’s called RSS. And the native format is HTML. It’s just that only some folks use it. That’s why I live happily-- all of those things I read in my RSS reader.
We don’t have it because hardly anybody uses it. I’m a hardcore RSS user, but we are rare birds. Most people use proprietary silos. Conversations are happening on those silos and relatively rarely in RSS.
For me, it isn’t a matter of reaching the widest audience. I don’t do this for marketing purposes (not anymore). But most of the people I know who use social media use BlueSky nowadays. Before, they used Twitter or Facebook. If I want to talk with them — and I do — I have to be there, not here and cross-posting links there.
Sure-- and that’s why I cross post. But I accept that rich content is not going to work natively everywhere. The links are our best fall back.
I’m relying on Micro.blog’s native cross-posting for text posts — today. Yesterday and Monday I was cut-and-pasting into each platform. Tomorrow I might do something else.
I’m constantly adjusting this and never finding a satisfactory solution. It’s like when you’re sitting in economy class on a long plane flight and wiggling and wiggling the whole time, trying to get comfortable and make your back stop hurting.