Samsterby

One of my aims with this blog is to act as a POSSE (Post on Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere) setup. Because that sounds like a peachy way to run a disparate selection of socials powered by a main place to write slightly longer form content.

There's also a political point to it, exerting control and asserting ownership of one's own output, rather than being beholden to platforms.

Native activitypub using Writefreely

The blog is running on a self-hosted instance of Writefreely (WF) and that includes some degree of native activitypub support. I had some initial problems following myself – but those turned out to be of my own making to do with my network/proxy/container setups.

Plenty of people seem to be using it but it wasn't immediately obvious what would happen or how it would work. Here's what I found out:

Question: Do posts show up as a link? Or long-form? Answer: They show up as the title, and a link, and then a preview card with the title (again), very first line of text, and a preview image which is just the first letter of my username. This is a big fail. Frankly it looks rubbish. I'm thinking we need some options for how stuff is presented, and how much text to include in the post body (from just the title to the whole damn thing). There is a “notes_only” option but I've no idea what it does.

Question: Do images get included? Answer: Nope. Not when viewed from masto anyway. Again this very much contributes to it looking rubbish.

Question: If so, what about alt-text? Answer: Double nope. I found an open issue from a year ago, in which they were thinking about it.

Question: If you reply to a WF blog post from elsewhere, what happens? Answer: You can reply, but it goes into the void and I'll NEVER see it. That's a big fail tbh. You're liable to get whole bunches of people chatting away expecting that you'd see and be able to interact with the replies.

Further thought: If we are including text in the post body, I'd want it to be updatable – just like when edits a masto post.

Much as I really like the stark simplicity of the WF interface and writing posts in Markdown – and it's a perfectly serviceable blog, it's not doing what I want in terms of publishing outwards. I'm minded to completely turn off federation and post links manually for now.

What about bridgy

Additionally, because I've got to try several things in parallel, I'm trying to work out if Bridgy will do this the “other” way – and directly post stuff from here to my other profiles including Bluesky. Will that work?

Yes... Bridgy works for posting a link from here out to Masto or BS, but it's basically a manual process. Why would I bother? It's also an absolutely rotten user experience – like mega bad confusing.