matt @matt@writing.exchange

@sfssm @schmittlauch @dansup For me it's the kind of incentives VC creates for the companies it produces, and what that means for users (usually nothing good, in the end).

VC rarely produces open protocols and ecosystems like ActivityPub. But it LOVES moonshots like "decentralize Twitter by building on the blockchain."

@schmittlauch @dansup This and this.

Added a new tool for reading Medium articles in peace:

https://makemediumreadable.com/read

You can also grab the article as Markdown -- maybe even publish to #WriteFreely!

@ingehygd Hmm, very weird... Searching for the handle doesn't work for me either, but searching for the URL works. I'll take a look.

Either way, now it'll show up: @ingehygd

@mrb @lerk It was a deliberate decision, because of the downsides that can come with it (harassment, dogpiling, etc.)

Some background on an old GitHub issue here: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/309#issuecomment-324486566

@liaizon Yep, that should work

And of course this ignores implementations like @darius's Hometown (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown) that display Articles in their entirety, making the post + comment perhaps a little less needed. But I still think it'd be nice to have.

(I think it's more noticeable with Articles because Mastodon only shows a title and the link. Which is oddly terse in social media land.)

One way to enable this while reducing abuse might be to let the publishing Actor (i.e. the post author) specify other Actors that can boost and add a comment. So e.g. @ matt @ write.as could allow: @ matt @ writing.exchange, and I could get the effect I'm after.

One time I really wish Mastodon had quote-tooting is when I'm sharing ActivityPub Articles (i.e. blog posts).

Would be awesome to natively boost a post with a little personal comment added, especially to aid in a fediverse conversation around the post. Otherwise you get what we have right now: every post is "Shared without comment."

@liaizon It involves manually checking endpoints right now.

For an instance, you'd verify that /api/nodeinfo exists (e.g. https://pencil.writefree.ly/api/nodeinfo). If it doesn't, then federation is disabled.

For Write.as, since federation can be disabled per-blog, you'd use Webfinger a webfinger request (e.g. https://write.as/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:matt@write.as). Here's code to generate that URL: https://paste.as/7oez9k470q6zjnkk

Still thinking about ways to standardize how we show this information in UI. /subscribe links are all user-generated

@liaizon Gotcha!

@liaizon Not personally, though they use @writefreelyhost to host that instance.

@ingehygd Hey, welcome! Have you enabled federation from your blog's "customize" page on Write.as? Once you do that and save your settings, it should show up here.

Let us know if you still notice any trouble!

@darius @hello Looks pretty nice! Next I think I'm most curious to see how often people's posts will end up coming out as Notes instead of Articles with this little change.