wakest

Here's the reason Article became a second class citizen...

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/5022

In this issue I raised against Mastodon in 2017 (on a now defunct github account), Mastodon at the time treated Note and Article identically. In particular, it removed all the HTML except for 'a' tags - even from Article. This made federation with the elephant impossible for us. At this time the ActivityPub fediverse consisted of Hubzilla and Mastodon. Period. The specification wasn't even final yet. Hubzilla provides long-form multi-media content, just like a blog. This content was completely destroyed by Mastodon's HTML sanitizer, especially blockquotes, which displayed everything we quoted as original text and mis-attributed.

My proposal to the Mastodon team (which was basically Eugen) was to relax the input sanitisation on the Article type a bit , and Mastodon could have their plaintext Note and we could have our multi-media and the fediverse be one happy family. Regardless of the fact that HTML is specified as the default content-type for all content in ActivityPub.

The response from Eugen was to turn Article into a link, meaning our content wouldn't be shown inline at all - and closing the issue. I believe this is the last time I ever communicated with Eugen and I will never, ever file another issue against Mastodon.

We started using Note instead, so that our messages would federate at all and knowing that Article would have been the most sensible choice.

We also need to strip all the images out of our perfectly renderable content and add them back in as attachments - otherwise they won't be displayed on Mastodon. As it turns out, Mastodon only adds back 4 images and reverses the order. This is less than satisfactory because the source content lets us position text around each image, and it forces anybody with multi-media content to not only perform this unnecessary step, but also to check every attachment on import and see if it was already included in the HTML - or it will be displayed twice.

As far as I'm concerned, Mastodon should be taken to the mountain-top and cast into the volcano. But it appears we're stuck with the infernal thing.

Today, open source publishing platform Ghost announced that it will soon join the Fediverse with ActivityPub integration baked-in to its feature suite. The announcement includes a handy explanation of what ActivityPub is, the benefits that provides to publishers on Ghost, and a deep dive into where these features will be found in the near future

you can respond directly from mastodon to his post by searching this link

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/528149

Hello everyone!

For the last two weeks, I have been working on an Android app for Lemmy as a side project. It's called Lemming and has now reached a state where I want to make it publicly available. The app is not yet available on the Play Store, so if you want to install it, you can download the APK file from Google Drive.

Here are some key features that Lemming has right now:

• Support for multiple accounts
• Swipe to vote for posts and comments
• Navigate comments with the volume buttons
• Long press on a comment to collapse it
• Write posts and comments with a text editor that supports text styling and a preview
• Long press on post image thumbnail to see the full image
• UI is optimized for phones, tablets, and foldables

Some screenshots to give you a better idea:

What's next?

I plan to release a beta version of Lemming on Google Play next week, to make installing and updating the app easier. Then I will focus on adding missing features like supporting links, displaying user profiles, personal messages, search and community sidebars. I also want to add customization options and improve the accessibility of the app. Lot’s to do :) Of course all of this depends on the feedback I get from the community and what is most important to the users. So don’t hesitate to give feedback and tell me what features you would like to see next!

cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/2263

I did a bunch of experiments today and ... thoroughly confused myself, so I wrote down a bunch of things and took screenshots.

Here's what I learned:

(I have more protocol info but ultimately this is the lived experience of working across different software systems, federation, and the actual client / front end web experiences that people interact through)

Paste Lemmy URLs

Various things "just work" by pasting URLs into the Mastodon web interface or the Mastodon mobile app.

Posting the link to this post https://lemmy.ca/post/606549 finds this post

Clicking on the user profile shows me a profile for Doctor_Pi@lemmy.ca, with one post displayed. Including a follow button

Only one post is shown, because that's all that's available on the local server right now. If I chose to follow Doctor_Pi's Lemmy account, I'd get all of their posts going forward. Both OPs (which has a link to the post on Lemmy.ca) as well as comments (which appear as replies).

Limited support on other clients

Other clients (Ivory on iOS) have extremely variable support. You can't usually paste in Lemmy URLs, but you can paste in Lemmy accounts and follow them, and then see posts going forward.

Please leave a comment of what does / doesn't work in your particular client.

Follow Lemmy users on Mastodon

Every Lemmy user can be followed on Mastodon. So, for example, my Lemmy account @boris@news.cosocial.ca. Paste that into the web interface of Mastodon or into the Mastodon native mobile app and you will find my Lemmy profile and can follow it.

Reply to a Lemmy post from Mastodon

If you reply to a Lemmy post using your Mastodon account, your reply will be posted as a comment. A user profile is created on the Lemmy instance.

I just did that with this very post, and it seems to have worked.

This is my boris@cosocial.ca Mastodon account, viewed through news.cosocial.ca as a local user profile. All of that info -- including the images -- are from my Mastodon profile.

The comment is technically originally on Lemmy.ca.

Create new OP post from Mastodon

You can create new OP posts directly from Mastodon. @-mention the group name, e.g. @vaneats@news.cosocial.ca.

Here's my test post which ended up creating this post in /c/cosocial.

It works! Exactly how the post ends up looking in Lemmy is a bit variable, so more experimenting to be done

Follow Lemmy Communities on Mastodon

Screenshot of vaneats through CoSocial Masto web interface. You can see a little "group" label next to the name

I can't actually browse posts from here, don't know if that's a sync issue or what.

Here's a screenshot of @vancouver@lemmy.ca which shows all the OP and comments.

All of the posts appear as boosts of the Lemmy accounts that are posting the content

Original

I reworked this post from a comment to LemmyCA Support on how the ActivityPub protocol works between Lemmy and Mastodon.

cross-posted from: https://news.cosocial.ca/post/356

An example of gathering extended information about the servers / organizations that run Fediverse Galaxies.

People are welcome to add their own organizations, and it is available at the link provided as a set of browsable web pages, as well as a JSON feed for consuming programmatically.

RSS is also available for people who want to learn about new orgs as they get created.

The repo is here: https://github.com/CoSocial-Canada/FediverseGalaxies

This still needs the schema for orgs to be fleshed out, and then displayed on the post pages in a way that is visible.

Background

@liaizon@wake.st made a post about what they are calling Fediverse Galaxies -- organizations that run more than one fedi-service https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/110566074350880589

Much like CoSocial is experimenting with a Lemmy instance as well as the main Mastodon one.

I pointed out that more information about the orgs involved could be interesting:

What is the organization type? How is it governed? How is it funded? How is it moderated? How can members get involved? — those are some of the important questions.

I suggested a GitHub based "API" site, which is what this is.