@help Discussion following Ben Werdmuller's post has gotten me thinking about my frustration with ActivityPub integration to Micro.blog. I have a modest proposal:

If a post has no title, send the whole thing out over ActivityPub. All of it. Do not truncate at 300 characters or 600 characters or whatever.

I know that this will be offputting to many Mastodon users. In that case, they might well unfollow me. I'm OK with that.

I don't expect you to implement this today or even this year. I know from past discussions that you hate this idea. I'm just putting it out there as a friendly suggestion.

I really mean the "friendly" part, btw. I'm overall quite happy with Micro.blog and the work you're doing, and you seem like a good guy.

@MitchW Thanks. I don't hate the idea. I'm not sure the best way to approach it, though. Perhaps in the future long posts on Mastodon will become more common. Already there is some variety there because the rare Mastodon instance is set to a higher character limit than the default.

@MitchW Yeah - I really agree with this. Most Mastodon apps put up read more buttons on longer posts anyway!

@help I suggest not waiting on Mastodon — just do it. Lead the way in this regard. Micro.blog is not a Mastodon server and not part of Mastodon, any more than it is part of Threads.

Titled posts would continue to show just the title on ActivityPub. Only untitled posts would be shared in full through ActivityPub. That way, Micro.bloggers could continue to control what they share.

Crossposting to Mastodon would continue to work exactly as it does now.

If you did this, I would almost certainly immediately quit crossposting from Micro.blog to Mastodon, and instead simply boost my Micro.blog posts with my Mastodon account. I would keep the Mastodon account for reading — particularly reading other people's boosts — and for boosting other people's posts.

(I say "almost certainly" because there may be knock-off effects I'm not considering. But I can't think of any downside to this at the moment.)

Another item for the wishlist, as long as my brain is working in this direction:

An "open in Micro.blog" tool for posts on Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms. I think there's an Apple Shortcut that's supposed to do that but I've never gotten it to work.

I want this so that when I see an interesting post on Masto that I want to reply to, I can easily reply from my Micro.blog account rather than my Masto account.

@Havn 😀

@MitchW Uodate: I’ve gotten the shortcut to work.

I find even the simplest shortcuts to be difficult on Apple platforms. 

@MitchW I like this idea, at least as an option.

@MitchW @help Right. Why not leverage Micro.blog as a unique ActivityPub player instead of using it to feed Mastodon? A shortcut or bookmarklet would cool too, at least for my iDevices. On my Mac, MarsEdit has a good bookmarket that could probably be used accordingly.

@markstoneman Micro.blog already has a sharesheet extension on the iPhone and iPad. Doesn't that do what a bookmarklet would?