Twitter Mentions Support

External sites
#1

I’m hoping some other theme-like developers or Manton can chime in here, but I’m trying to think a bit about how to get better federated-mentions support for Twitter accounts on Micro.blog. I was thinking something like @{handle}.twitter would be nice to have native support, where on my blog it would show
https://twitter.com/{handle}
on the timeline it would also be a link, but on syndication to Twitter, it would just send the text and be properly read as an @mention.

I don’t think that I can do this with a shortcode alone, unless there is a service-by-service Hugo template that can be exposed that I could edit (similar to how some people want to edit whether links and titles go to Twitter or summary excerpts, etc).

7 Likes
#2

agreed this needs specific support, cos way more people have Twitter handles than M.b ones, so I use @ to by default mean Twitter. Most of the time it’s fine cos account doesn’t clash with an M.b so it’s just plain-text (e.g.), but sometimes it does and your delineation would be useful.

1 Like
#3

Yes. Agree and like this suggestion. I frequently reference Twitter and it’s clumsy and requires me to think about how it will cross-post, which is extra friction.

1 Like
#4

Platform-specific stuff like this is where to go next. I’ve been caught up in digital art and Twitter since last popping up all over the help center. This grabbed my interest via the “while-you’ve-been-gone” email summary.

This may or may not be scope adjacent to my idea of creating a lightweight, Micro.blog-specific, markup API with which we could specify various platform specific data points within a post (hashtags for example) that would not appear in the core blog post but from which @manton could parse out this additonal data as the cross-posting backend matures.

1 Like
#5

Until micro.blog supports this natively, it would also be nice if anyone could recommend a good app for writing replies to tweets that follow IndieWeb standards as best as possible.

1 Like
#6

+1 for something along these lines. Bridgy is one of the biggest things I miss from WordPress.

1 Like
#7

Agreed with everything here.

#8

I’m in favour of this change but would resist the .service syntax. Here are two alternatives:

  • @service-url

    This syntax is familiar to everyone from e-mail. So @username@service-url is transformed to https://service-url/username.

    Pros: Similar to e-mail, ease of implementation, used by Mastodon.

    Cons: Looks ugly.

  • :service-url

    This is a variation on the above syntax but uses : rather than @. So @username:service-url is transformed to https://service-url/username.

    Pros: Looks nice, ease of implementation (assuming : is not permitted in MB usernames).

    Cons: Unintuitive

#9

The double @ is similar to Mastodon support, which I misremembered.

I don’t have strong feelings on syntax. I was thinking of reverse domain name notation, for whatever reason.

#10

Thanks for this discussion, everyone. I still have mixed feelings about natively supporting Twitter usernames, but I have been working on better support for Bridgy in terms of bringing tweet replies into your blog. I’ll announce that this week. Maybe that will help inform how the @-mentioning could work.

3 Likes
#11

Willing to close this conversation (is that thing on Discourse?), but had one last thought-- what I’m really thinking about here is an easy way to do h-card references with a u-url from doing a shortcut or short code.

The additional “special” support would be based on how/whether those h-card references can be processed differently when crossposting.

The latter could be supported as a plug-in if crossposting was facilitated based on processing a Hugo content template included in all themes by default. For example, layouts/post/twitter.html, layouts/post/medium.html etc.

#12

Over the weekend, I wrote two plug-ins for Jekyll that add basic support for domain-specific mentions to my blog. It only handles cross-posting to Twitter so is not as full-featured as Micro.blog’s solution but it suffices for my needs.

In case it’s helpful, either to other Jekyll users or as a proof of concept, there’s a short explanation of it here.

2 Likes
#13

I would love to see something similar, as well. I love having an ease of access mentioning other people, particularly because most of the folks I run with aren’t actually on the indieweb at all, so mentioning them via their socials is sort of the only method of properly acknowledging them for the time being.

1 Like