Twitter Mentions Support

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Agreed with everything here.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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