Can you hear me Fediverse?

how · September 27, 2023, 1:42pm

Did you associate your #SocialHub account with your fediverse account yet?

If yes, then you may reply to this announcement directly from the Fediverse. #Exciting times!

how · September 27, 2023, 2:35pm

Hmmm… This should have appeared in my feed by now, but the error log is empty. Well, not so, but it’s not saying anything about failing to publish.

erlend_sh · October 3, 2023, 6:02pm

What account should I be following to see this announcement? @fediverse@socialhub.activitypub.rocks ? It appears empty on Mastodon (Ivory).

And is there a link of this fediverse post that I can go directly to?

aschrijver · October 4, 2023, 6:50am

@angus maybe there should be an easier way to find the actor to follow in the Discourse UI. Like having both the post URL and actor URL in dialog that pops up when clicking the AP icon at the top of this thread…

ActivityPub dialog only shows informative notification, but no URL's

how · October 4, 2023, 7:31am

I think I published an Article so it is not supposed to appear on Mastodon, which is quite a shame actually. Something like using an excerpt as a Note to supplement the article would be awesome, but then it would require using #c2s wouldn’t it, since it would address a single server-type that does only support a Note.

Is there a way for ActivityPub announces to specify that they can have multiple forms? (I.e., a single Create activity would let others choose whether they want to take it as a Note, Article, or something else.) – I would guess that the Activity should send a Collection.

P.S.: I reverted to sending Notes, because most people use Mastodon, which is quite a downer since we’re supposed to have interoperability and federation. We’re not there yet.

angus · October 6, 2023, 1:53am

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll take it into account.

Indeed, I think there move there is to lobby mastodon to implement a version of this suggestion

github.com/mastodon/mastodon

Always show object `content`, regardless of object `type`, if `mediaType` is supported

opened 01:02PM - 12 Mar 23 UTC

Oblomov

suggestion

### Pitch Currently, Mastodon separates ActivityPub objects between “supported”… and “converted”, based on object type. Converted objects will only display a title, spoiler text and URL. This is the case even if the object has a `content` that could be handled no differently than the Note type. A better approach would be to map object properties to the internal model whenever that makes sense, regardless of the object type. This would mean mapping the title & summary to the spoiler text, the (sanitized) content to the text (if supported, i.e. if its `mediaType` is the default `text/html` or other supported format), etc. ### Motivation The choice to reduce non-supported types to “title + link” even when content or other compatible attributes are present has no apparent motivation, and leads to issues ranging from the one described in #8892 or #19357 to poor user experience both for Mastodon users and for users of other federate platforms that wish to be more accessible to Mastodon users. Classic example is the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress recommending to use `Note` instead of `Article` as AP object type, even though `Article` would be the more sensible choice, because otherwise Mastodon followers won't be able to see the post content. Arguably, PixelFed's choice to use `Note` as object type is due to the same reasons. I know that at least for `Article`s the official rationale behind the choice is that Mastodon is intended for short messages only, but the fact that Mastodon accepts the exact same content when it's presented as `Note` instead of an `Article` (or anything else), the rationale seems ultimately pretty weak, and the _practical_ effect is that other platforms end up abusing the `Note` type to improve the Mastodon users' experience and avoid being relegated to “title and link” on the dominant platform. So, if there isn't a stronger rationale than “Mastodon is supposed to be for short messages only” (that ship has long sailed), I think it would be better for the entire ecosystem if object attributes were mapped to equivalent status attributes whenever possible, independently from the object type.