Please someone help me understand how the link between Micro.blog and Mastodon works.
What I would like to do is have my posts in Mastodon (and the reply thread that some may have) appear in my Micro.blog timeline. I see many Micro.blog users in the timeline that show their interactions from Mastodon.
I’ve read the Help articles about this topic. I set a Mastodon compatible name in Account –> ActivityPub. I have my Micro.blog feed cross-posting to Mastodon. But I want my posts and replies from my Mastodon account (Esteban Umerez 🐘 (@eumrz@esq.social) - esq.social) to show in Micro.blog and I just can’t find the way to do it.
There’s not currently a way to do that. Micro.blog can show replies to your post from Mastodon, but it can’t show replies to the copy of your post that is sent with cross-posting. When you see Mastodon replies on a blog post (such as one of my recent posts) it’s because people are following the ActivityPub username, not following a separate Mastodon account.
We might be able to add support for showing replies from a different account, but it would take some thought because you’d probably want to merge in replies from Micro.blog too.
This is what I needed to understand, now I get why I was seeing Mastodon replies on Micro.blog.
If not the replies, I’d still want to find a way to publish my Mastodon posts on Micro.blog and on my blog. I did set a Mastodon RSS feed in Account → Feeds, but I found that the Timeline duplicated the posts that were originated in my blog (cross-posted to Mastodon and sent back to Micro.blog), which I think is not good for the Timeline.
Micro.blog users in Micro.blog responding don’t generate an ActivityPub response because that’s not what they are.
Just go over how this works/the options:
Micro.blog with an ActivityPub “feed” – replies can come via micro.blog to the post in micro.blog nothing to do with ActivityPub or people following the ActivityPub feed from Mastodon can reply, they’re replying to an ActivityPub post, it will show up in Micro.blog from their Mastodon account. All of the replies to a Micro.blog post this way is seen within Micro.blog and can be replied from there.
Cross posting to a Mastodon account, replies to the Mastodon account will be in Mastodon as ActivityPub replies over there. But the original post in Micro.blog is disconnected and in Micro.blog as it’s own thing. Replies to that post from Micro.blog won’t show up in Mastodon because it has nothing to do with the cross posting account.
The core “problem” is if you post on Micro.blog from a Micro.blog account, there’s a representation of your blog post on your Micro.blog timeline that is totally separate from any notion of ActivityPub. If someone follows you on Micro.blog, it’s not an ActivityPub / mastodon situation. Micro.blog itself is fundamentally not a Mastodon instance.
You can unify all replies to a Micro.blog post to being viewable in Micro.blog using an ActivityPub compatible Micro.blog user name. But you can’t unify to only have things exist on Mastodon without turning off having any Micro.blog feed.
I’m going to jump on the wagon. I wanted to ask this: Is there a way to customize the Micro.blog posts for blog posts?
That is, say I have a long post. Title and all. On MB’s feed I will see the post’s title with a link, but nothing else. I’d like to intercept that somehow. This way, over at Mastodon, I can boost my MB account’s post, which I can customize for Mastodon.
So instead of “here is what I think about mastodon: https://…” I can customize it (on MB) to say “I have a few things to say about #mastodon here is what I think about mastodon: https://” and this will show both on MB and Mastodon.
There is no way to customize automatically cross posted content. It is either a full content post or a title + link.
The closest thing would be to customize your RSS feed to use the summary template for a post and then use the RSS feed as your input into Micro.blog — maybe. Even then, summary has limited use because micro.blog does not allow setting summary in the front matter so it has to be processable from the main content of the blog.
Just wanted to add something to the part of the discussion about some Micro.blog replies not appearing on Mastodon… Thanks @jsonbecker for the detailed answer! We are slowly enabling ActivityPub for more accounts, so over time most replies will be able to appear on both Micro.blog and Mastodon. But even then, someone on Micro.blog could choose to disable it for their account, so their replies would stay Micro.blog-only.
And again, cross-posting is a different thing, because it’s making a Mastodon copy of the post, which disconnects it from the thread of replies on Micro.blog. It’s good to have the flexibility (cross-posting or ActivityPub) but personally I use ActivityPub for my blog because it keeps everything nicely together.
I understand that when I create a post on MB, it automatically copied and sent to Mastodon, and there’s no way to customize this automation - but that’s not what I mean exactly.
I’m looking for a way to customize blog posts to the timeline.
Currently, if I have a long post on MB, the post is a single line (the title with the link). I want to change that, on MB, add my own text, a sentence or two.
A manual way to do that would be to disable the automatic posting of my blog posts to the timeline in MB. Then I could copy the link to the MB post in my own words. But this goes against what MB is about to me, the idea is that you just micro-blog, it’s all on the timeline.
I just want to have the option to say a few words about what I’m posting beyond just a title. Does this make sense…? Or maybe I didn’t understand what you said originally.
Totally makes sense. I was replying to a different comment previously in the thread… We are mixing a few different things in this topic.
@jsonbecker is right that currently it might be possible by creating a plug-in that provides a custom feed to Micro.blog, replacing the default feed. That is a lot of work and requires development experience, so maybe it should be a plug-in that we provide for people who want that kind of control. There’s no concept of a “summary” for blog posts in Micro.blog right now.
Got it. Well, I don’t want to go on about this topic (which is a tangent anyway) - just want to say that if this is looked into in the future, perhaps Hugo’s feature can be used, so that would be the default summary that will also show on MB. Just a thought.
We probably aren’t going to support that unless Mastodon moves away from the 500-character limit that most servers use. I don’t think it’s a very good reading experience to have longer blog posts on Mastodon… Better to link to your blog for that.
Well to the account on MB servers should have limit unlocked? I would be ok with it working anywhere and seemed like was possible but didn’t figure it out from settings how to do it?
I like either of these suggestions, with the added note that if the post is 500 characters or under, just send it to Mastodon without any modification at all. To the Mastodon follower, it should just look like any Masto post.
This thread has a lot of overlapping topics in it, so let me try to clarify what we’re planning on doing in the near-term:
Slightly increasing Micro.blog’s post limit and better handling quoted text when truncating. I’ll be blogging about the change details later.
Preserving the first 500 characters when sending the post to Mastodon.
Personally, I still find 500 characters a little too long. 500+ characters is a good full blog post, but a lot to read in the timeline when skimming through posts, especially on small screens. So it’s important to me that we find the right balance that works in Micro.blog while still acknowledging that Mastodon exists and needs something different when cross-posting.
I’m fine with preserving the 280-character limit in the micro.blog timeline, if we can go up to 500 characters in masto.
We’re all still figuring out the fediverse, and one of the big issues is how to handle cross-platform integration. I appreciate the careful work you and your team are doing here, Manton.
