Full text when federating short posts

Feedback Feature requests
#1

Currently, blogs that are federated push new posts out as a brief synopsis with a link back to the originating site. For longer posts, that’s fine, as some Fediverse platforms are only geared for short form, but for short posts (e.g. <280 characters), it seems more in the spirit of federation to just push the whole message.

What I’d like to see is some form of detection incorporated into the default behavior, so that short, untitled messages go out untruncated, while any posts longer than 280 characters, or that have a title, go out with the text truncated to SMS length, with a link back to the full text on the originating site.

Beyond that, some settings options to customize that behavior would be nice, even if it’s as simple as a checkbox asking “Truncate and linkback SMS-length message for federation.”

#2

Thanks for bringing this up! We actually do federate full posts as Articles instead of Notes – Mastodon actually converts our posts to Notes, and only displays the title and URL. Today there isn’t much support for this ActivityStream type in the fediverse today outside of Pleroma, WriteFreely, Plume, and a few others.

We have started experimenting with sending out full-text Notes here: writefreely#220 – it’s based on line breaks, rather than text length. But I’m sure there are plenty of ways we could do it. Would love to hear your input there!

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#3

Just to update this, we’ll officially be releasing those changes in WriteFreely v0.13! Posts will still be sent out as Articles, unless they contain a double-line-break, in which case they’ll be sent out as Notes. WriteFreely admins can also set notes_only = true in the [app] section of their config file to have WF always send posts as Notes.

This feature is also live on Write.as now, sending out both Articles and Notes.

#4

Excellent, thank you!

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