Is there a way to get Mastodon comments to show up on my micro.blog, without changing instances? I’m on social.coop/@hollie right now, and I support that instance monetarily and have been really happy there. I realize I could pipe my micro.blog directly into Mastodon using the “Set Fediverse Username”, but when I’ve done that before, it creates a new account that has no followers and follows nothing, so it just sits there inactive.
My micro.blog posts show up on my social.coop Mastodon feed through cross-posting, but the comments to those posts don’t cross-post back to my blog. Is there any way I could make that work?
The slightly longer answer is no; there’s currently no solution for exactly that. But, there’s a plug-in called Reply on Mastodon that shows a button on cross-posted blog posts that takes the visitor to the conversation on Mastodon. In theory, a programmer should be able to fetch the conversation from Mastodon and present it inline on your blog as well. But no one has built that for Micro.blog. At least not that I’m aware of.
In case any plug-in developer out there would like to implement this, here’s what I figured out… Provided you have the instance hostname and toot id, you can fetch replies via /api/v1/statuses/:id/context. For cross-posted blog posts, the hostname and id are available via .Params.mastodon.hostname and .Params.mastodon.id in the Hugo templates.
Bridgy could help with this in the future. It will send replies from Mastodon back to Micro.blog. However, it currently only works when the post includes a URL back to your blog. So, for Micro.blog that means long posts with titles or truncated posts. I discovered recently that there is a way to work around this limitation by including Microformats in the blog post that link to the Mastodon cross-post. That will require theme changes, so none of the built-in themes support it yet.
You could go ahead and enable your fediverse identity from micro.dot blog, Follow that account from your social.coop account and then share it from your social.coop account instead of crossposting from micro.blog. That’s something I may start doing myself.
Yeah, this is a good idea. I think I’ve been resisting this because I want to have just one Mastodon account (one account to rule them all!) but the more I consider it, the less feasible that seems unless I want to learn a whole bunch of coding to solve all these niggly little issues. I admire coders, what folks are able to build is so cool, but I just don’t have the space in my life right now for that path. I need to get more comfortable with workarounds.
Yeah, this is a good idea. I think I’ve been resisting this because I want to have just one Mastodon account (one account to rule them all!)
Yeah, same! The one account to rule them all seems so close! In recent days I’ve actually gone the other direction, manually following micro.blog accounts I from my Mastodon account. The lack of proper keyword searching is probably going to be the main thing that keeps me at Mastodon.
From my Mastodon account I can search and find lots of posts and accounts based on interests, something lacking in micro.blog.
Another is that Mastodon provides for saving hashtag searches and creating lists, both of which I’ve come to rely on. Were I to try doing all my fediverse browsing from micro.blog I’d loose all those options.
All that said, it’s not too hard to manage these two accounts and bounce back and forth!
I would so enjoy building something like this.