Not sure there's a solution: if shorten post's URL slug, federated links break

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#1

In case it’s not clear from that cumbersome subject: I often truncate a given post’s URL slug to a shorter one, or at a more readable break point, but I noticed that of course what this means is that anyone who clicks the link that exists when someone has followed, e.g. @myblog@myinstance.tld via their Mastodon account, it’s a dead link.

I can’t think of any way to fix this other than letting us set the slug while we are initially creating a post, rather than only being able to edit it after the fact. Otherwise, basically all my federated items will have broken links in them.

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#2

That is a good idea @bix. Perhaps it could be an addition to the editor to edit certain parts of a post’s metadata (slug, date) before it gets published? Another thought is allowing us to have access to the Fediverse accounts of our blogs, but that could open a can of worms.

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#3

I feel like just adding it to the publish workflow would be fine.

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#4

There’s also maybe another option, if this is technically feasible?

The link that exists via federation could use the post ID string instead of the slug. So instead of, e.g., someone on Mastodon following my blog receiving a toot with a link to

https://write.house/bix/yancey-strickler-co-founder-of-kickstarter-recently-presented-two-theories

which would fail because I’d later changed the slug to make it

https://write.house/bix/yancey-strickler-co-founder-of-kickstarter

the toot would have the link

https://write.house/an8ypcifid

which will work no matter what the slug.

ETA: Well, shit, actually, this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t redirect. It literally loads that URL rather than redirecting to the post’s real URL. Hrm.

#5

I like the idea of having an option before publishing, like in the settings menu with font etc.

#6

I should note that at this point for my purposes (and I’m nothing if not always thinking about my purposes here), if URL slug generation took a single, consistent approach, I don’t think I’d ever bother with needing to customize the slug. (This pivot mostly comes from WF usage over time; I don’t care about custom slugs anymore, but about consistent approaches to the auto-generation).