tallshipHi Daniel, that's a few questions, which begs that question, "Why the heck would I use a mastodon account?"
One reason, certainly isn't because I can currently ask or answer questions, including tags and addresses I'm CC 'ing in less than 500 characters - because we can't, generally.
So you're really asking if you can carry the feature sets already supported by most #Fediverse platforms to a resource hog that turns out to be good for little more than short bursts of text and pasting links to 3rd party resources located somewhere else, here's what might help...
In mastodon, there are some links that will imbed images and some that won't. It's willy nilly, and depends how you do it. Every platform handles this a little differently, so settling on one that meets your needs on a platform by platform comparison is prudent.
Those such as #Soapbox, #Calckey, #Friendica, and others actually do support much of what you're asking.
Currently, yes you have to do what others already do in the #silo_space when it comes to linking different types of media platforms. i.e., #Faceplant, #Twatter, #InstaSPAM, #YouTube, #Reddit...
Analogs are those #Fediverse platforms already mentioned above and others such as #Pixelfed, #FunkWhale, #PeerTube, #Lemmy, #OwnCast, #Castopod, etc.
There are currently a few ways that people are achieving what you're pondering.
#ZOT has nomadic profiles and in #Hubzilla you can enable the #ActivityPub addon. But your nomadic profile doesn't include anything related to your other #ActivityPub based Fediverse accounts.
Since you inferred merely adding additional hosts for each of those Fediverse platform analogs under your gultsch.social domain, you might want to consider adding #OIDC support to your Fediverse servers. This can provide you with #SSO capabilities. Some organizations currently do that.
And there's also what #Minds is doing, although they still haven't managed to finish integrating ActivityPub into their platform. They've layered #Nostr into Minds. A few Fediverse platforms are experimenting with doing that very same thing too.
The "ActivityPub"way is, of course, what you mentioned - find the video and and comment or boost it from another account, but many platforms like SoapBox and Friendica will generally render the image or video linked. Calckey will render previews of at least 3 links per post.
So it's not really that much different, when posting links, to how the deprecated, privacy disrespecting, legacy monolithic silo platforms do it, but you also have the opportunities to follow, comment, boost, and #Quote_Post other people's (and your own) content from across the Fediverse.
Kinda kewl, but in most cases, unless you layer something like Nostr or OIDC on top of your infrastructure, there really isn't a way currently to use a single user identity enabling you traverse all of your accounts across the platforms and share, boost, etc.
I hope that helps!
#tallship #FOSS #internetworking #DeSoc
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Lunatech
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