On Mastodon it would appear that post titles are not shown at all, but body text is:
on Pleroma it shows the post title with a link back to the Writefreely instance, followed by the body text:
and on Misskey it shows the post title within lenticular brackets, followed by the body text, and then links back to the Writefreely instance at the bottom:
I think it would make sense to instead (or additionally) put the post title in the Content Warning. This way all clients get to see the post title, and it looks the same to all ActivityPub implementations. Additionally this means that one could actually use the post title as a CW so - for example - an entire post from a NSFW blog isn’t showing up on their timeline in public.
This seems to be how Mastodon handles Notes. Basically, when you publish a short post (a single paragraph) on WriteFreely, we send it out to the fediverse as a Note (microblog post) instead of an Article (blog post).
It seems Mastodon doesn’t show the title attribute of these Note posts. (But if you publish a longer post, you’ll notice that the title shows up on Mastodon instead of the body.) This is just how different fediverse software decides to render this content.
One solution might be to include the title at the top of the Note post’s body, so it looks similar to Pleroma. Otherwise we’ll need to investigate how we might get this data to work with Mastodon.
This is - again - why I just suggested setting the CW to the title. It works for everyone without any issues, and it won’t look strange to Pleroma or Misskey users.
Yeah, just based on my experience over the years, I don’t think most WF users would desire that… CWs of course have a particular purpose behind them, and shoehorning every single blog title into that just feels like a hack to get around Mastodon shortcomings. (I’m happy to be told I’m wrong if more people think otherwise.) But I’m absolutely open to supporting CWs as a separate, per-post option in the UI of course.
This is what non-test posts look like in Mastodon, fwiw. Note that the title shows up fine, and any attachments (images) are included. I think we’d lose this and some other niceties by CWing everything.
