Mastodawn

let's bring #longform (text) support to the #photoverse

(this is not (mainly) about long texts on #pixelfed or #vernissage (they can both fall back to show the summary), it is about supporting image posts with the object type: `Article`)

* https://github.com/VernissageApp/VernissageServer/pull/442
* https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/6458

https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/b2b8/fep-b2b8.md

#fediverse #activitypub

Add support for Article type objects by pfefferle · Pull Request #442 · VernissageApp/VernissageServer

Summary WordPress ActivityPub plugin sends blog posts as Article type (not Note) This change treats Article objects the same as Note objects Allows WordPress blog posts with images to be displayed...

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Manton Reece

@pfefferle This is a nice FEP. I’ve been waiting to support Article until I had a better idea of how Mastodon handles displaying them. Have y’all done much testing of that?

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Matthias Pfefferle Feb 10

@manton It works quite nice on most of the text based platforms, but as I learned with my toot: we have to improve the way how blogs can best interop with the #photoverse without beeing spammy or federate unrelated featured/stock images.

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Manton Reece Feb 10

@pfefferle I see. Yeah, in Micro.blog we often have long-form blog posts that are actually a photo album: a title, maybe a little bit of text, and a dozen photos.

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marius Feb 10

@manton isn't that a better fit for a text object with attachments?

@pfefferle

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Manton Reece Feb 10

@mariusor @pfefferle If we did that, there could be some data loss… The user could have text in between each photo. It seems better to put the content out in the fediverse in the best format and if other platforms want to simplify or toss out some data, that’s okay.

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marius Feb 10

@manton one way you could do this is by uploading the images, then adding the URLs as attachments, while at the same time they can be linked inline in the text content.

Of course this would be way too much to handle for Mastodon, but from an ActivityPub point of view it makes sense and doesn't require any hand wavy solutions.

In my one user ActivityPub web-app, I have all the moving parts I described above working, but they haven't come together just yet, because the UI for posting is just a CLI tool and it's difficult to describe in markdown an image that hasn't yet been uploaded with a stable URL. But writing this gave me an idea... 🤔

@pfefferle

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marius Feb 10

@manton here's an example: https://marius.federated.id/posts/2025/may/framework

(But this was done in multiple steps, I have added the attached images in an edit, just now)

@pfefferle