Has there been any thought to cross-posting to Pixelfed?

Cross-posting
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Pixelfed is an Instagram-like service based on ActivityPub like Mastodon. Has there been any thought to supporting cross-posting to Pixelfed?

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Because it’s ActivityPub, I’m quite confident you could setup Pixelfed account as a mastodon account for crossposting. I think the challenge is that Pixelfed is pictures specific, and there’s no way in Micro.blog to set a crossposting setting on a per-post basis. You can limit it to one category feed, but you’d have to exclude that post from your main feed, which virtually know one wants.

This has been discussed extensively (more control over what posts are crossposted) without much change.

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I think you can only have a single cross poster activated for each “type” though, so that doesn’t quite do it if you have a Mastodon account as well.

Of course, I’m still not clear on whether I actually should have both… I do find it (the Fediverse) a little confusing in that regard. :slight_smile:

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That’s interesting. Yeah, Micro.blog assumes you only have one Mastodon-type account per feed. Can’t really think of an easy work-around for that at the moment. Eventually, we will have better support for multiple feeds that contain the same posts, so in that case you could have a photos feed that only went to Pixelfed. There are still some issues to work out before we can support that, though.

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A simplified approach: if I had an RSS or atom feed for my pixifed photos could I feed that to micro.blog to share it there? Not bidirectional.

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Definitely. You can add any RSS feed to your Micro.blog account under Account → Edit Feeds & Cross-posting. Then Micro.blog will automatically add those posts to your Micro.blog profile and the timeline.

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I tried this and it did not work after pixelfed gives authorization.
Feed solution may work, but that doesn’t sync to the micro.blog posts; adding it ‘as posts’ doesn’t transfer to blog, but it seems like adding RSS to Micro.blog feed does work fine; just means that pixelfed posts and microblog have to be posted separately, like wordpress.

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I would vote to have this crosspost-feature to Pixelfed! There is a crossposting to Flickr, which is also a similar photo-network. So why not have crossposting to Pixelfed!? Even as this is part of the Fediverse!

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I’m going to be adding Pixelfed as a separate option soon. Thanks!

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Will it only cross-post non-screenshot photos like Flickr cross-posting?

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I’m not sure. Seems like we should start by making it the same as the Flickr support for consistency. They are different, though.

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Thanks Manton, I’m looking forward to Pixelfed support.

For my 2c, I really hope we only post photos in the same way as they’re treated on Micro.blog (or at least have an option re what to include).

Combining photos and screenshots seems like conflating two fundamentally different things to me.

It’s a general problem with using ActivityPub/Fediverse as a central identity. A “photo feed” or “blog” and “every random image or thought I happen to have tooted” are just not the same thing. At least not to me. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I tend to agree with that. I checked our Flickr support and it does cross-post screenshots too, though. We haven’t heard any feedback about that, but I don’t think Flickr is used as much anymore either.

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You can add a filter to exclude PNG files, right?

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Sort of. Because cross-posting is based on feeds, if you want to exclude certain posts, you’ll need a special feed that is based on a specific category. That complicates things, though, so I don’t currently recommend it.

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Pixelfed support is ready: Manton Reece - Pixelfed cross-posting in Micro.blog

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So what’s the current behavior? All posts or just posts with photos, including screenshots (like Flickr)?

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All image types, like Flickr. Also, unlike Mastodon which only allows 4 images, Pixelfed is up to 10 images.

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I appreciate this was to be in line with Flickr behaviour.

To clarify the behaviour is it all posts no matter how long that contain images. Or is it only going to cross post “short posts” with images?

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Currently it assumes they will be short posts without a title. Full-length blog posts with a title are less likely to transfer to Pixelfed well because they might be something like a paragraph of text + photos + more text + more photos. Pixelfed is like Instagram, just a bunch of photos and a caption, unlike a full blog post.

Similar to the Flickr support, I think Pixelfed is most suited to just simple posts with a photo and text. Anything more complicated you probably want to manually post to your blog and Pixelfed separately.

I consider this just an initial implementation, though, and I’m happy to adjust it based on how well it works in the real world.

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