I wonder if it would be possible to skip publishing the content of a blog to the Micro.blog timeline and still cross-post it to another social network.
For instance, I have epictalestavern.com, which I would like to share on Mastodon and Bluesky but skip the Micro.blog timeline because I don’t think it’s the kind of content for Micro.blog. I would rather have my personal blog on my Micro.blog timeline.
Does it make sense?
I agree with that. A while ago, I talked about it in a reply to @manton.
https://micro.blog/vladcampos/36357389
No, it’s not possible today. Cross-posting is currently tied to the Micro.blog timeline.
But if you’re okay with third-party solutions, you can use a service like @rknightuk’s EchoFeed.
I know it’s not possible. I’m aware of the current implementation (or limitations). But I wonder if it would be possible (with small changes in M.b’s side). The idea is to start a conversation for a change in M.b’s implementation.
Ah, sorry, I misread your question.
It’s possible in theory, but @manton recently described the cross-posting part of the code as a can of worms, so… maybe not tomorrow? 
Right. My understanding is “not possible” and “unlikely” on a “reasonable” time frame.
I also don’t think something is “bad” for the timeline. Who would find it to follow and how? And would it be bad if someone did find it and like it?
The timeline is really just another way to follow a site like RSS. I wouldn’t overthink it.
I think this originated from a need to not share everything with Micro.blog that may “harsh the mellow,” aka Micro.blog’s general vibe. I still want to post it to my blog, which is hosted on Micro.blog. My posts on politics have led to uncomfortable situations, but I don’t want to stop myself from posting about it (coz it’s my blog, right?), so the next best thing I could do is to spare them from reading it.
The sources page and automatic crossposting is one thing. I imagine the easiest implementation of this idea is putting the manual crosspost button on draft/scheduled posts. It would only work on web but allow folks to skip their micro.blog timeline or manually crosspost and then schedule out their automatic posting.
In a way, this is the same problem I experience here. In my case, I don’t want the posts in Portuguese, which are in a separate blog, being posted to my main feed in English.
I second this. I want to post about things of importance to me, to save to my blog, but I don’t always want it all up on everyone’s face. If someone finds it and wants to comment, so be it! But I don’t want to spam everyone with pics of my kids daily, (for example), or a bunch of random stream of consciousness posts, etc. The current setup of requiring timeline posting has actually hindered me from posting.
I have just today made a workaround by creating a category called “Timeline” and only posting to that when I don’t care if it’s spread far and wide. That category’s RSS is now my main blog feed for the timeline and cross posting. I am having some trouble though, since images don’t seem to get cross-posted by using the category RSS. Hoping this is fixed soon.
The work-around for using a category feed is best for now. The main thing to watch out for is that when using this solution, don’t include more than one feed on the Sources page unless you’re sure that the same post won’t appear in multiple feeds. If you only have the Timeline feed set, that should work.
Do you happen to have an example of a post with images that wasn’t cross-posted correctly? It might’ve been another issue and just coincidence that it was in the Timeline feed.
Just tried again and this was the result on Bluesky. Photos don’t get cross posted from my category feed.
This is an acceptable workaround for now coz Manton mentioned that a separate option for Micro.blog timeline is not technically easy to implement. But yes, I hope the cross-posting using a category feed works exactly like for the main feed so I would be curious what issues crop up for what destinations and for what kind of content in a post.
You may also want to be cognizant of the character limits in the destination platforms. For e.g., anything above 300 characters will link back to your blog which may work for you but it doesn’t for me. Sometimes markdown code which doesn’t get counted in the limit at Micro.blog gets counted in the limit for other platforms.
I’ve had issues in the past, now mostly resolved, where Bluesky was really picky about image sizes and formats.
I’ve since learned that links don’t even cross post when using a category as your source.
Are you sure that you don’t have some customization of your category feed content? Are they xml feeds instead of JSON? (I’ve seen a bunch of people have problems fixed using JSON feeds instead).
No customizations. Also, categories on Micro.blog don’t have JSON feeds. Thus, they have to be xml.
You know what? My last comment is no longer true, and I’m pretty happy about it. I don’t know when the change occurred, but categories now have JSON. This is something I’ve brought up as an issue several times and it appears to have solved all my cross-posting woes.
You can see all the output formats that are generated by default here. Of note, both taxonomy (categories in general) and term (a specific category value), output to HTML, RSS, and JSON. As long as your theme has layouts/index.json – which is included by default when it’s not present, so you’d have to override it to be wrong-- you’ll get JSON feeds there.
Git blame shows someone realized 10 months ago that this was taxonomyTerm which was removed in the versions of Hugo on MB.
The official Micro.blog documentation still only shows XML at category feeds. Even the official Indie Microblogging book by Manton does not list categories as having available JSON feeds. I had experienced this limitation first hand and I never did see any official rollout. I think the documentation linked here should be updated.
