Federation Troubleshooting

I can confirm that all is as it should be.

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A post was split to a new topic: Unable to follow blog

Here is a Federation issue from @gendor regarding turning off Federation on Write.as:

I tried to disable federation on my blog while I was busy importing a bunch of posts and didn’t want to spam everybody’s timeline. I unchecked "Federation @gendor@gerritniezen.com" and clicked “Save changes”, but it kept on federating, and when I refreshed the customize page the checkbox was checked again.

When I try to subscribe to my blog, it shows that I have sent a follow request, but I don’t know how to approve the follow request. My blog federation is @oldyogre@write.as, but I don’t know how to sign in anywhere as that identity and approve follow requests. I didn’t think I would have to, as the blog is public. Any guidance?

I’m not too happy with the text that is being shown on Mastodon as a preview. I do not understand what the rules are for text to be displayed on Mastodon. Does it always show the first paragraph? Why doesn’t it seem to work with links. Why can the text be over 500 characters, when it is a continuous paragraph? All in all it seems unpredictable unfortunately.

I understand, that Mastodon is responsible for how it shows these write.as articles on the fediverse while using Mastodon. Still: is there a way to implement something in cooperation with Mastodon that could trigger the preview to end? Like an html code? Or some more information on when the preview is cut off and when it isn’t.

Thank you :black_heart:

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Federation doesn’t work for a while with my blog. I’m not sure but I believe it stopped working when I switched the domain from tobenschmidt — Write.as to https://tobenschmidt.writeas.com/. Disabling federation and enabling it again didn’t help. Any hint what I can do to make this work again?

Ok, federation with my blog seems to be working again. I did a test with a very short blog post without images and it was posted to the fediverse as expected. I don’t know if this has been fixed or it worked because of the very short blog post. I’ll check this with the next regular blog post.

Attempts to follow being processed as follow requests rather than just following.
With no way to approve a follow request in the writefreely interface.
I thought it might be Pleroma specific, so I tested it on Mastodon, with the same result. I dug through the settings, the config.ini, the forum, and even the github code. Cant figure it out.

Same issue at @atyh here. I can see the profile in Mastodon but not the posts when I follow my Writefreely account. Not sure yet how to troubleshoot, but will try to look in logs.

I’m in a tangle with managing my fediverse presence, please help :roll_eyes:

First issue: How (or where) do I edit the text displayed for a write.as account, for example this account.


Just like a regular mastodon account, I’ve tried to log in to mastodon instance @write.as with user identity @papers but this doesn’t seem to give me access to an account.

Second issue: How do I read any replies to toots on this account? Specifically any DM responses. Obviously, I’m interested in reading any comments folks make on my blog posts. Don’t I need to log in as <papers>, to read responses to ‘me’?

Sorry to be so naive.

You can edit the description in your Write.as Customize page https://write.as/me/c/YourUsername under Description (optional).

As for comments, in short, you can’t read or interact with replies on your Write.as account. In this post I explained why and described a workaround @matt suggested.

That said, Matt is planning to improve managing federated comments:

Thanks @PaoloAmoroso . I do have a short description that appears in blog posts. But I was hoping to do full profile management, as for a normal Mastodon account.

Thanks for yr workaround. I guess I’m not too much interested in Remark.as. I’d rather be able to exploit my existing Following in Mastodon. So I’ll check out @matt 's work in progress, thanks.

I do manually maintain a mirror site in federated wiki for my write.as blog . And I might try to manually maintain a comments/dialogue page there. After all, I’m not expecting huge amounts of dialogue traffic, so manual reposting (from email, from Mastodon) might be sufficient? I have an interest in exploiting federated wiki as a public form of quite tight mutual ‘narrowcast’ collaboration through following and forking, designed to do different things than the ‘broadcast’ medium of a blog.

Am I just being dumb? Is it possible for me to log in to Mastodon as @papers@write.as? And then (apart from managing my Mastodon profile for the blog) read all replies and favourites, and reply to them, from my write.as blog identity? All, inside normal Mastododon-space? Via an alias.

It’s indeed not possible to sign into Mastodon as your Write.as account. And Write.as doesn’t provide profile management features beyond editing the blog description and setting the profile image via the favicon.

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Nope. They are completely separate accounts on separate servers.

so… if someone replies to my blog’s toot, where do the replies go? Can anybody read them?

The answer may well be in @matt 's posts above. But they’re a bit opaque to me. I’ll look at them again .

If someone replies to your blog’s toot the reply shows up only in the commenter’s Mastodon account and nowhere else.

ok, beginning to understand

Seems like this is close to release? :grinning:

It would make sense (to me) to run fediverse toot replies, to a blog’s fediverse toots, in the fediverse (ie Mastodon). But if, instead, fediverse replies are channeled into write.as space (as with a normal, non-federating blog) that’s rational, and workable.

@matt How will your average fedizen, replying to a write.as toot, know that the conversation has branched into another space?

The same way you know it’s federated with any ActivityPub server I expect: most folks don’t.

Some software (I know Akkoma does) shows the platform icon next to the username of a post, so that would make it clear that it’s not mastodon. I say Mastodon, because most folks using alternate platforms are a bit more aware of the various options.

Oh wait, mastodon just displays a post link anyway instead of the post content. So I guess that would be clear enough :person_facepalming:

I personally like having replies/comments below a blog post - with me as the blog creator able to approve or remove posts as required. Threads of comments would be welcome, to me.