Tag: Mastodon

I’m experimenting on my tech tips articles with

I’m experimenting on my tech tips articles with #ShareOpenly, a web app that acts as an intermediate layer between sites that want a share button and newer social media sites like #Mastodon instances.

The author describes it here: https://werd.io/2024/share-openly.

Basically:
1. The publisher links to Share Openly with the URL and title or description of the page to share.
2. The reader clicks on it and tells SO what site they want to share on (pre-filled or type in a hostname, with the manually added ones remembered).
3. SO opens that site’s post form with the text pre-filled and ready to go.

It knows where to find the posting forms for several kinds of server software, and you can add a <link rel="share_url".../> template to your site to tell it where to look. I may do this for my Postmarks site.

But not everything has a post form that can be pre-filled. Heck, not everything has a front-end to begin with. So I can’t just put that link tag on my #GoToSocial instance and point to the post form, because there isn’t one. And it doesn’t look like Elk or Semaphore have a way to pre-fill a post either.

sigh Sometimes I really wish #WebIntents had taken off.

Anyway, here’s an article on my site with “Share This Page” linking to the webapp
https://hyperborea.org/tech-tips/finish-by-scheduling/
#

The way Mastodon sanitizes HTML coming from other instances flattens out block quotes …

Noticed that the way #Mastodon sanitizes HTML coming from other instances flattens out block quotes in addition to removing other #formatting.

(Totally separate from the quote-toot debate.)

If I follow someone on WordPress or GoToSocial or Calckey etc. and they include an indented quote, when it shows up in Mastodon, it’ll look like the quote is just another paragraph.

That can totally change the meaning of the post!

Found an open issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15311

On Wandering.shop

It was pointed out that many of this user’s other posts also contained blockquotes, and I fear that I may have misunderstood many of their posts due to there being no indication of this.

Now you might not think this is an issue if you’re not used to being able to post blockquotes in the first place, but if you’re getting them from somewhere else and you don’t know it, that can be a problem.

For instance, the first paragraph in this post isn’t actually written by me, it’s a quote from the original GitHub issue from two years ago. Writing this on GoToSocial it’s trivial to indent it (and if you look at this post on its own site, you should see it correctly!) and it doesn’t make sense for me to have to think about how many of my followers might be on software that actually breaks my posts!

(The missing italics in the second paragraph are less of a problem, but they would be nice to see them go through.)

On GTS.Keysmash.xyz

Ironically if ActivityPub shared the original #Markdown instead of the rendered HTML, the meaning would still be intact, because Markdown matches so closely with the plain-text #semantics that have developed over *decades* of text-only newsgroups, early email, Twitter/Facebook, and so on.

On Wandering.shop

Fediverse single-user software testing so far: Mastodon (deactivated) – about what I expected, same as being on another serv…

Fediverse single-user software testing so far:

Mastodon (deactivated) – about what I expected, same as being on another server except it’s faster, quieter, and needs a bigger VPS that feels justified.

GoToSocial (here!) – I like the simplicity of it, and it works great with Pinafore. Going to have to test out Elk or something as a backup. However, it’s early in development and a lot of features aren’t implemented yet.

Calckey ( @kelsonv )- Complete, but also kind of overwhelming.

Snac2 ( @kelsonv@snac.hyperborea.org ) – Extremely bare-bones. Like web 1.0 style. But still talks to the Fediverse!

The big problem I’ve been running into is that while they all seem to interact well with Mastodon, they don’t interact well with other platforms like Pixelfed, or Bookwyrm, or Lemmy, or even each other. So none of them are at the point where I can use it as my main window on the Fediverse, unless I go back and build a new solo Mastodon server.

Discovered an advantage to generating the #LinkPreview on the receiving server: You'll still get …

Discovered an advantage to generating the #LinkPreview on the receiving server: You'll still get previews on posts from other #ActivityPub software that doesn't provide its own.

For example, a post from #GoToSocial in its current alpha version seen on #Mastodon.

On Wandering.shop

“Nostr is a distributed social media protocol that has a chance of working.”…

“Nostr is a distributed social media protocol that has a chance of working.”

…that involves generating a public/private key pair and sharing the public key around, signing your messages, connecting to different relays…

People coming from Twitter are confused about *picking an instance* of Mastodon. I think the barriers to entry might be a little higher on this.

https://www.nostr.directory/

On Wandering.shop

FINALLY If you’re trying to use the Linode marketplace build for mastodon, you need to …

FINALLY

If you’re trying to use the #Linode marketplace build for #mastodon, you need to fix some permissions in one of the #docker containers.

Otherwise it’ll fail on uploading media, accepting follows, possibly more.

Run this:

docker exec –user root live_web_1 chown -R mastodon:mastodon /opt/mastodon/public/system

On Wandering.shop

As terrible as the old remote interaction workflow was, the new method of showing a …

As terrible as the old remote interaction workflow was, the new method of showing a URL and telling the user to copy and paste it is so much worse.

#mastodon #ux

On Wandering.shop

Follow, reply, boost, whatever. The pop-up to send you over to your own instance was a pain. But the pop-up telling you how to work around it is like putting up a sign telling people how to get to the back entrance instead of fixing the door.

I finally added some screenshots (and more troubleshooting tips) to my guide on how to …

I finally added some screenshots (and more troubleshooting tips) to my guide on how to post to #Mastodon from anything (including #RSS, #WordPress etc.) using #IFTTT

How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT

(Incidentally: I built a new recipe from scratch to make sure I wasn’t missing any steps and tried to publish it as a reusable applet, but it turns out IFTTT won’t let you publish applets that use webhooks.)

On Wandering.shop

It is so weird to see triple-digit boosts in the feed.

It is so weird to see triple-digit boosts in the feed.

On Wandering.shop

The funny thing is all the viral posts about how Mastodon is designed to make it harder for things to go viral.

With comment threads longer than I’ve seen in ages.

(Harder, of course, doesn’t mean impossible!)

(And yeah, I’m guilty of boosting some of them too!)

On Wandering.shop

Time for me to stop contributing to the problem of over-saturating the feed with meta-commentary.

(Oh no, I’m doing it right now!)

On Wandering.shop

With all the new people on the fediverse lately, I’m kind of getting overwhelmed by the multi-column UI.

I have been using the “advanced” interface for #mastodon (TweetDeck style) ever since I joined, mostly because I never got around to trying out the now-standard one when it was introduced.

But with all the new people on the fediverse lately, I’m kind of getting overwhelmed by the multi-column UI.

So I thought I’d give the simpler one a try.

And you know what, it’s actually a nicer balance! Going to try this and @pinafore and see which I end up liking better for desktop.

On Wandering.shop

One problem: I don’t see a way to pin hashtag searches in either of them the way I can in the multi-column view. (I’m thinking it should appear similar to the Lists feature.) Am I missing something, or is it just not implemented in either of these UIs?

#ui

On Wandering.shop

I updated my article on posting from #IFTTT to #Mastodon again to clarify a few …

I updated my article on posting from #IFTTT to #Mastodon again to clarify a few things, and to recommend botsin.space for accounts that will *only* include automatic posts.

I use this technique for several things:
– Link to every new post from an #RSS feed at @SpeedForce
– Post differently tagged links from #Pocket here & at SpeedForce
– Cross-post a very occasional #WordPress blog here

https://hyperborea.org/journal/2017/12/mastodon-ifttt/

On Wandering.shop

@Virelai I believe it searches posts that the instance you’re on knows about already, without …

@Virelai I believe it searches posts that the instance you’re on knows about already, without calling out to other instances. So it’ll show you hashtagged posts from:
– the local timeline
– remote users that local users are following.
– remote toots that have been boosted or searched by URL on this instance.

On Wandering.shop

@VirelaiI’ve found that searching on a small instance like booktoot.club turns up fewer results than searching wandering.shop or mastodon.social, but if I search for a hashtag on a bigger instance, then copy the URL of a toot over to the search box on the smaller instance, the smaller instance will find it the next time I search for that hashtag.

On Wandering.shop

Yes, I suppose data revealed through a system *working as intended* isn’t technically a “breach.”

Yes, I suppose data revealed through a system *working as intended* isn’t technically a “breach.”

Most social media these days is built around selling access to participants’ data, directly or indirectly (through ad placement). It doesn’t have to be, but that’s the business model that’s taken hold.

There are alternatives to the big data-mining social networks, but they have their own drawbacks. Blogs still exist, Mastodon is making great strides, you can self-host if you can afford it & have the know-how (or know someone who does)…

But your friends/family aren’t on [cool social network], they’re still on FB & Twitter, so you need to keep them around to talk to them.

And it takes time, effort & money to maintain your own site.

And a lot of networks aren’t as polished as the ones you’re already on…

Leaving FB/Twitter isn’t easy for everyone, or even rewarding for everyone.

We can make it easier, help people diversify, & grow those alternative networks, but let’s not blame those who accept the trade-off & stay on the major sites.

Still, user data is the product. Breaches need one kind of solution. Business practices need another.

New Archive: Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram

I’ve set up this site to archive my third-party social networking posts on a site that I control and can easily search. For now I’m setting up the following networks to archive here using IFTTT:

  • Facebook (public posts)
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Mastodon.Social
  • Photog.Social (a Mastodon instance dedicated to photography)

I’m less concerned with keeping everything in its original form, and more concerned with being able to find it (and work my way back to comment threads), so I plan on removing/combining duplicates as I find them, cleaning up links, etc. but I don’t want to get too complicated with it.