Mastodon user background image?

How do you set a background image for your Mastodon profile?

That’s currently not possible. Micro.blog can communicate with people on Mastodon, thanks to the ActivityPub protocol, but is not a full-featured Mastodon server. And probably never will be.

That said, you could always wish for the feature to be implemented. If enough Micro.blog customers want this, @manton may implement it.

thanks (I’ll stop rechecking all the config options!)

what if I was to also start a chant, @manton! @manton! @manton! :raised_hands:

Chanting doesn’t help prioritize feature requests unfortunately. :slightly_smiling_face: But asking multiple times usually does, especially if we hear it from multiple people.

Micro.blog doesn’t have background profile images, so I’m not sure where this would fit exactly. Maybe if a blog theme had the concept of a header background that it could also be sent to Mastodon? Just thinking out loud.

@manton That’s an interesting idea. I think minimal options make sense here, otherwise people might as well set their own separate Mastodon account/instance/whatever it’s called and then use cross-posting and the like.

thanks @manton

settings wise I half expected it to be found either near where I configure my avatar or my mastodon name. I think maybe if it were template related that it might sometimes have a negative bearing on people’s template choices?

It just looks weird from within mastodon when an account has no background image, almost as if as a user you haven’t been bothered, or you’re a bot or something.

Hmm, never occurred to me that a profile looks incomplete without a background image. If other people feel that way, we could certainly prioritize this.

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+1 to this

I’m new here, as in, this is the very first time I communicate with anyone on micro.blog

Apart from the profile banner, should my @bitdrome@micro.blog avatar be visible across the fediverse? It’s currently being displayed as a grey block everywhere else.

This is what it looks like for Mastodon users:

I’m seeing the correct profile photo from another Mastodon instance:

I think Mastodon keeps the images cached on each instance for a very long time. I expect it will eventually update, but I’m also looking into changing Micro.blog to notify Mastodon servers whenever the image changes, which should force it to update right away. I’ll likely be rolling out that change we add background banner support.

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Pleased to meet you @manton!

And thanks for your help!

I’ll chime in too.

I wonder if how long it should take for the profile header to show up in Mastodon (the one that can be set at https://micro.blog/account/mastodon)? I aliased my previous Mastodon account to point to my ActivityPub name @juha@juhaliikala.com and updated the header image too at that point. But some hours later, the header image was still showing as the “old one”. I tried to upload a new one after that a few times, but it doesn’t seem to get updated. Not sure how long that usually takes? Any pointers @manton? :slight_smile:

Oh, and another related thing. Is there a way to verify the Blog URL that shows up in Mastodon for the profile?