Mastodawn

Jesse Skinner Jan 3, 2023

@feditips I made my own, along with integrating Mastodon replies and interactions. Code is here:

https://www.codingwithjesse.com/blog/add-mastodon-replies-to-your-blog/

Add Mastodon replies to your blog - Coding with Jesse

You can now comment on blog posts on Coding with Jesse! I turned off comments years ago, because I was getting tons of spam. But recently, with my return to social media, I decided to integrate Mastodon to give people a way to comment on and interact with my articles.

Jesse, I have a question about the privacy and consent implications of pulling the replies onto your blog:

Does a user know this is happening? Can a user stop this happening?

Jesse Skinner

@UlrikeHahn
Good question. It's exactly as public as the interactions on the Mastodon posts. In a way, it's almost like the blog becomes a Mastodon client of it's own. Or maybe similar to having your tweets embedded on a website. But no, the user might not realise their replies or interactions end up on the website. If they do, and don't want them there, it'd be up to the website owner to manually remove them.
@feditips

my intuition would have been that users replying on Mastodon need to know that there replies will automatically appear as comments on an external webpage, seeing as I might reasonably feel comfortable (as a hypothetical user) about contributing to a discussion on Mastodon, but not about leaving a comment on a blog.

2/ there are then more specific questions that follow from that:
1. is it clear from the way that the comments are displayed on the blog that they were made elsewhere (ie does display reflect what user actively opted to do)?

2. is the decision on public/unlisted/follower only/DM that I made when replying in Mastodon respected in any way?

3.are my settings on search engine indexing respected as a proxy for the extent to which I want my words appearing outside of M?

@UlrikeHahn @feditips Good questions. I don't think you can say a website is internal or external to Mastodon - any website can be part of the Fediverse.

@UlrikeHahn @feditips

In the context of how I've personally done it -

1. Yes, my blog does refer to discussing the blog post on Mastodon, and all the replies & interactions link to the author and to the post on the author's Mastodon server.

2. Yes, brid.gy only has access to fully public replies, so only those get sent as webmentions.

3. AFAIK that setting is just about having your profile searchable, not your posts.

thank you, that answers most of my questions!!!

(also, I am clearly not versed in thinking about consent in the context of technical systems, though I do have to think about consent a lot in my own work).

Hypothetical follow up, then: if 1. weren't the case, would it be possible to simply display my comments as if they had been made on an external webpage, and if yes, is that a consent issue, and if yes, what (if anything) would there be to mitigate against that?

@UlrikeHahn @feditips Hm, I would think this is more of a copyright issue than a privacy issue, probably analogous to quoting an article from someone else - you should at least give attribution and a link back to the source. These toots are little microblog posts, because Mastodon is a microblogging platform, so maybe that helps clarify some of the appropriate usage.

seems to me its potentially both, but, for the moment, I'm trying to wrap my head around the fediverse behaviour itself as I clearly don't understand it yet!

apologies for my ignorance.