Hello there !
I’m running two instances : Mastodon and Writefreely, through a YuNoHost distrib.
Let’s said writefreely is on write.domain.tld and mastodon social.domain.tld
I’m running some tests to make a small writing social club by combining these two platforms, and I’m quite happy with that, except…
I’d like users who write texts to be able to see them in the masto instance in the global feed, but the only way I found is to tell users “be careful to follow your blog with your mastodon account in order ton see your posts, and let others see them as well”. These are not ppl used to deal with such complicated situations, as I would let them join the fediverse smoothly, I’d like things to work easily from their point of view, even if I’d be glad to explain all the fediverse stuff.
Is there any way to link @social.domain.tld masto instance and all @write.domain.tld “texts” ?
This is actually a little bit more complicated, as masto doesn’t load all the previous “toots” sent from the blog1@write.domain.tld, and only show those which will arrive from the moment of the subscribe.
The perfect result would be : public blogs automatically pop in the global feed of the mastodon instance, the unlisted and private blogs stop showing their posts, and everything keeps updated if the publicity option is modified
I found a (ugly) way that could be a first step, but it’s definitely not an elegant option.
I manually add in the database “remotefollows” of Writefreely an entry that tells Writefreely my mastodon account follows the collections (blogs) n° 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, …
So, even if the blog doesn’t exist yet, when it’s created it’s already virtually followed by me. So, it implies any new post on WriteFreely will be displayed in the global feed of the instance, as if I’ve really subscribed, even if I didn’t even know le blog existed.
Many problems I see :
- mastodon doesn’t seems to know my account follows the WriteFreely blogs, well it does say the blog has 1 follower, but it doesn’t say it’s me
- if the user decides to pass its blog in “private” or “unlisted” mode, WriteFreely still sends updates to mastodon, so people won’t be able to read private posts, but will still be notified it has been created. Same problem with the unlisted mode : it unlists the blogs from the reader view, but not from the masto instance
Actually I tried the “trigger” phpMyAdmin tool, but it’s not activated, I think it’s because of the nature of the connection between writefreely and mySQL.
Maybe I’m looking for a way to automatically watch the creation of a new blog, and update this “fake” follower when it’s relevant (when the blog is “public”, I add the fake follower, when it’s unlisted or private, I delete it). It would be less ugly, but it would still fake the subscription. Well at least it would respect the publicity of the blog.
I have posted the same question on mastodon discourse, but if anyone has an idea that could help me, or a clue, that would be great.
Thanks a lot !
edit : well, I keep thinking about it and I wonder if it wouldn’t be more convenient explaining the whole stuff to my fellows writers, that would allow them to keep control over their publications… I keep looking for a simple way to perform the task, but maybe the best solution is to transmit the knowledge, and let them use it as they want to