POSSE and backfeed

Development
1

Moving a discussion from writefreely#319.

@shinenelson posted:

I’m not sure whether this would categorize as a whole separate feature in itself, but I’m going to put it out there anyway.

How about implementing IndieWeb POSSE and backfeed?

I’m aware that this is way beyond the scope of what this pull request is trying to do. I’m probably coming out of nowhere and stepping on your toes, but I thought it’d be a good idea that could also pave the way for a bigger discussion.

And to start the discussion, I’d say the advantage of implementing POSSE would be that the syndication of posts would be uniform everywhere and they’ll all point back to one canonical URL.

And IF, at some point in the future, Twitter or other social media decide to embrace ActivityPub, this would still work backward compatible too.

@rgx1 posted:

I think this is a great idea.

I do use a couple of different Crossposters, and one of them, the one made by Renato Lond, does a beautiful job of bridging the platforms.

I have mentioned them both in a recent post.

Renato’s output will look like this :

image

The link to the source post is live and working. Another crossposter I use does less well, creating less attractive output.

image

…although the link to source is present and working.

We could do better yet – I could created a better looking post, with the full source URL hidden (and it will display so, even in the normal Mastodon instances), using the MarkDown support provided at my Glitch.Social instance.

Source looks like :

#xp

RT [@TheMedicaIVideo](https://twitter.com/TheMedicaIVideo/status/1266604854358814722)

the beauty of brown eyes 👁`

And outputs :

image

That post is Here.

As I noted earlier this week upon experimentation, this looks wonderful on Glitch-Social, and will display hidden URL even on normal Mastodon 3.x.x instances.

There seems to be an allowance for these hidden URLs in posts originating from other platforms in Fediverse – and while plain vanilla Mastodon WILL strip off Bold, Italics, etc, it will preserve the URLs as intended.

I love this – and have made posts now that have up to 5 URLs included and not a single ‘https’ to be seen. Clean, elegant, functional.

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