There have been some scattered discussions I've seen over the past year that mention that @pfefferle's WordPress ActivityPub plugin federates their blog posts out as an as:Note, and that the only reason this is done is because Mastodon only treats as:Note (and as:Question) as a first-class object and relegates anything else to a fallback handler that takes a short snippet of the content, and shows a link back to the original source, thus losing any in-app benefits (boosts, replies, etc.)
Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know. So that's why I'd like to ask Mattias — or anybody else with some context — here.
For reference:
as:Article: Represents any kind of multi-paragraph written work.
as:Note: Represents a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length.
as:Page: Represents a Web Page.
I have also noticed that Lemmy, perhaps out of principle, sends out an as:Page for new generated content, and only the replies federate out as as:Note. It has unfortunately led to some assertions that Lemmy's federation is "broken", even though it is arguably not the case.
I don't even blame Mattias for opting to send everything out as as:Note.
End of the day right now it doesn't matter how Mattias or Nutomic represent their higher-level collection of data, because Mastodon is the largest implementor and neither they — nor anyone else I know of, for that matter — treat anything that's notas:Note or as:Question specially.
But that ought to change. The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.
What's important to me right now is what the landscape looks like right now, and why that is the case.
N.B. The discussion here will eventually make its way to online real-time discussion at one of the future WG meetings.
I Read part of this as "Is Matthias lying". And although we've never spoke directly, I thought "What an absurd proposition".
It likely makes sense for things to be Note when mastodon wants to read them. I Wonder if there is a possibility of content negotiation, so that when mastodon asks (presumably with mastodon user-agent) it gets a note, but future improved software could have a different type.
It's an interesting problem, as you can never truly own all clients
@julian@pfefferle@pfefferle@nutomic Mastodon already can display long Note content (it adds "Read more" at the end), I think it is reasonable to do the same for Article and other types of objects.
>The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards
@silverpill@julian@pfefferle@pfefferle@nutomic I am not very knowledgable about ActivityPub so I cant discuss the specifics, but we would like to improve how non-Note objects are processed/displayed in Mastodon.
If there are discussions about this, or a WG working on the topic, please send me the links so I can reference them for us to read when we start working on this :)
One of the ideas would be to support an embedded "view more" modal, that somehow displays the remote content.
@simonwood@julian@nodebb as Simon said, this is a user choice! You can choose “Note” if you want to have the best compatibility or you can let the plugin choose what the best format is. And then we try to map the WordPress internal post formats to the ActivitySteams Object-Types. Standard Post == Article, Status & Aside == Note, Image == Note with priority on image attachments, Video == Note with priority on video attachments, …
@pfefferle@simonwood@julian@nodebb why "note with priority on inage/video attachments"? do wordpress post formats allow Image/Video posts with multiple attachments?
@trwnh@simonwood@julian@nodebb WordPress does not have the concept of attachments. So we are parsing inline-media and add them as attachments before federating them. So yes, you can add as much media to your post as you want!
@pfefferle interesting. is there a concept of mixed-media formats, then? the reason I ask is because my first assumption would have been that Image maps to Image, in particular when it's a single Image. likewise, that Video maps to a single Video where possible. but i suppose that wouldn't completely work with multiple media files or mixed media, would it?
it may be worth thinking about alternative approaches like perhaps an "Album" extension type that is a Collection of Image/Video items?
@trwnh you can add as much media as you want with mixed media formats! So for normal notes and articles we take the media files in the order they are added to the text. For video, we search for videos first and fall back to others if there are no videos. Same for audio and image posts.
@pfefferle@evan the thing i’d be interested in thinking through is Create Collection (or a subtype) instead of Create Note, because the Collection itself may have relevant metadata. or more abstractly, defining what a wordpress Image or wordpress Video really means
@evan@pfefferle well, not quite, a Collection is a generic presentation mechanism and can contain anything, like ldp containers or a filesystem directory/folder... whereas a MediaAlbum type would be specifically a Collection containing Image/Video, kind of like media albums on Facebook. i suppose it could also be done as a “range” property of type:vocab, but having a dedicated type allows some impls to treat it as a “post” if desired
@evan the separate type would be specifically for signalling additional semantic meaning, namely "this is a media album", i.e. "this Collection contains only Image and Video items"
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