Mastodawn

Reduced engagement due to Article type

NodeBB federates out Note or Article depending on the length of the content. While this by-and-large works, the article logic does not encourage as much discussion as expected because a summary is generated so as to provide something for microblog-style software to show (otherwise, it would only show the title (name) and a URL to the forum.)

That summary is limited to a maximum or 500 characters, ending at the last full detected sentence.

When composing a long topic, 500 characters may not be enough to fully introduce the topic and engage users. This lowers click-through rates.

I expressed my frustration about this online to @thisismissem and suggested that I might just revert back to sending the entire post content in summary. This would violate FEP b2b8's recommendation that summary be a maximum of 500 characters:

It should be a maximum of about 500 characters; a few sentences; or a short paragraph.

After consultation with Matt Baer of Writefreely (@[email protected]), he suggested the following changes:[...]

https://activitypub.space/post/1350

Emelia

⁂ ActivityPub.Space

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Julian Fietkau

@[email protected] You could also extend the leeway for Note conversion while keeping the summary length, that feels like a potentially useful option.

By that I mean letting posts with a length of n>500 (700? 1000?) through as a Note, but still cutting the summary at 500 if it's even longer. Avoids the situation where there's like one sentence cut off.

I do like the manual  though, I picked that habit up from some CMS decades ago and still use it on my own blog.

@matt @evan

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julian Feb 25

@[email protected] yes, that is another adjustment I was going to add. Right now the cut-off is hard-coded to 500, but this could be adjusted by the admin based on preference.

Perhaps this could even be allowed at the user level, but I am loathe to add additional options to the UCP lest it end up looking like an airplane cockpit