Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Michael Martinez :verified: (michael_martinez@c.im)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:25:15 JST Michael Martinez :verified:

   • Matthias Pfefferle

   Much as I like the concept behind the #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress, it's not doing a good job.

   And it comes down to tagging.

   In order to federate your tags you either need to include them high up in the content (for excerpts) or you need to federate the entire post.

   Whole-post federation consumes other people's resources and I've seen some pushback against that. So I opted for the excerpts.

   But with the excerpts I'm limited to how many characters are federated. Injecting tags into the top portion of the posts requires characters. And there are other problems, because the kinds of tags people use on the fediverse aren't necessarily the kinds of tags one uses on a blog.

   I'd like to see the plugin enhanced so that it can allow the user/author to add "fediverse tags" that are appended to the end of either the whole post or excerpt, but which do not create new tag archives on the blog itself.

   @pfefferle would that be possible?

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:25:14 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez It is already possible. you do not have to put the tags to the content at all, they will always be added as meta data, so they will not block any space at all.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:31:37 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez regarding "adding no tags to the archive".

     I tried to re-use as much as possible from core WordPress to map that to ActivityPub, but I think there are still a lot of folks that do want to have different things on Mastodon, than on WordPress... why that?

     This is not cross-posting, the plugin is about bringing the blog to the fediverse, without creating special "views" for Mastodon.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:36:50 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez why would you like to have tags that are only for the fediverse but not shown in the blog. Even Mastodon creates archives for tags.

     To have a properly working solution, that is compatible with Mastodon, we would have to introduce a different kind of taxonomy which also creates archives, but different ones.

     On the other hand there are requests to have the tags even more dominant and create Actors for them, so that if is possible to follow tags and categories.

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Martinez :verified: (michael_martinez@c.im)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:50:17 JST Michael Martinez :verified:

     in reply to

     • Matthias Pfefferle

     @pfefferle But they don't appear in the fediverse. So the posts cannot be found in searches for those hashtags.

     If you search for #tolkien or #middleearth none of my recent content shows up but the posts are live.

     Here's an example: This post is tagged "magic" and "the numenoreans" (or "numenoreans") in usual WordPress style. But if you search those hashtags on the fediverse, you won't find that article.

     Even if I go back and edit the post and add hashtags to the top of the page, they won't appear in fediverse searches.

     In order to be fully federated, I must embed the hashtags at the top of my content (because I publish excerpts) AND I must allow the plugin to convert them to standard blog hashtags. So if I want to announce to people there's a new "tolkien" "middle-earth" blog post, I have to create and add to those WordPress tags even though I don't use them on my [Tolkien and Middle-earth] blog. It's completely redundant.

     https://middle-earth.xenite.org/did-the-numenoreans-possess-magic-other-men-could-not-wield/

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:50:59 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez maybe an issue with your instance? I see your post on the hashtag view without problems.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:52:54 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez maybe an issue with your mastodon instance, it shows fine on mastodon.social

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:55:53 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez tags you add to the template won't work, because the template is not parsed for hashtags. As I already mentioned tags have to be at the post level, otherwise it won't work with mastodon properly.

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Martinez :verified: (michael_martinez@c.im)'s status on Monday, 01-Jul-2024 23:55:54 JST Michael Martinez :verified:

     in reply to

     • Matthias Pfefferle

     @pfefferle See my other reply for details and an example.

     I can get around this by reposting the URL from this account (not associated with the blog) and adding the hashtags in my content. But that's tedious.

     Or I can wait for the long-promised #quotetoot feature (or whatever it will be called) to be added to Mastodon's core code, but even then I would still have to reshare everything and manually add the hashtags.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:04:55 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez but that's what I tried to explain: you do not have to add the hashtags anywhere in the content! simply tag the post with tolkien, using the normal wordpress tagging system and the plugin adds them automatically to the post without blocking any space.

     you can check if they the output by adding `?activitypub` to the end of one of your posts

     the #hashtag feature is simply an extension for users that only want to only use the content field or Mastodon Apps to add their hashtags.

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Martinez :verified: (michael_martinez@c.im)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:04:56 JST Michael Martinez :verified:

     in reply to

     • Matthias Pfefferle

     @pfefferle I don't mind seeing the tags at the end of the post (the current theme on the site is embedding the standard tags there).

     I just don't want to have to embed the hastags at the top of the post because that makes all the excerpts look very similar.

     I can redirect any individual tag archive to another destination - so if I MUST create a set of #tolkien and #middleearth tags I can live with that. But the plugin limits what I can embed in the excerpt (I'm guessing because that's what the theme decided was useful for excerpt length).

     I'm just hoping to expand the fediverse visibility without having to find another theme.

     I use Classic Themes - hate Gutenberg. And that blog is so old (has so much content) that switching themes creates issues because of the Featured Images. It's a very complicated situation.

     But I manage or help manage over 100 sites. We could federate them all if the plugin were just a little more flexible. As it is, we're stuck because it's too limiting.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:08:17 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez here is an example: https://notiz.blog/2024/04/26/activitypub-the-evolution-of-rss/

     No hashtags in the content at all but you see them if you search for the post in mastodon or if you search for #pubsubhubbub (you might have to search for the URL first, because it might not be federated with your instance yet).

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:20:08 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez this is a very good point:

     > It's like me tagging every fediverse comment with #michaelmartinez - there's no benefit to it.

     And this is exactly how it should works! Only things you explicitly tag should show up in searches, otherwise you would spam the hashtag pages.

     If the plugin would allow everyone to tag the whole blog with a ton of tags, this could break the whole idea of hashtags, because it widely opens the door to spam!

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Martinez :verified: (michael_martinez@c.im)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:20:09 JST Michael Martinez :verified:

     in reply to

     • Matthias Pfefferle

     @pfefferle But you're missing MY point.

     I want to avoid using the tags "tolkien" and "mdidleearth" if I can - because they're redundant on that Website.

     It's like me tagging every fediverse comment with #michaelmartinez - there's no benefit to it.

     The blog's name is not a tag. And repeating the name as tags doesn't serve any useful purpose for blog visitors. It would just be a trick to get the fediverse to see that the blog is associated with those queries.

     I can redirect the tag archives to the main archive, sure, but I might one day want to use those tags to collect articles specifically about [J.R.R.] Tolkien (or anyone in the Tolkien family) and the concept of Middle-earth.

     If I do as you suggest, I'll have to create distinct tags (like tolkien1 or tolkienfamily or something).

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:23:57 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     @michael_martinez thanks for your openness too! I am always happy to talk and to support new features!

     But I want to get sure, that the plugin plays nicely with - and by the rules of the fediverse.

   • Embed this notice
     Michael Martinez :verified: (michael_martinez@c.im)'s status on Tuesday, 02-Jul-2024 00:23:58 JST Michael Martinez :verified:

     in reply to

     • Matthias Pfefferle

     @pfefferle And YOU have a point.

     I'll keep thinking about how to handle my needs.

     Thanks again.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 05:51:45 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     • MB

     @mbm @michael_martinez there are a lot of filters that allows you to add tags to every post without having to write much code.

     Having that feature in the settings makes things so much more complicated and hard to understand for users, because if they are not really tags, but simply added via options, they will not be listed when filtering by tags, so it will break endpoints like featuredTags.

     It would also not possible to follow these tags.

   • Embed this notice
     MB (mbm@masto.ai)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 05:51:51 JST MB

     in reply to

     • Matthias Pfefferle

     @michael_martinez @pfefferle

     I think @michael_martinez has got a point.
     IMHO there are tags that make no sense on a blog website, but are useful in Fediverse.
     Eg. I may like to search Fediverse for #blogging looking for new blog entries, but it makes no sense to tag every blog entry as such on a website.
     On a website tags should vary, in toots some should be repeated to maintain coherence.
     Why is that? Fediverse is much more diverse than a single-themed blog.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 05:52:41 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     • MB

     @mbm @michael_martinez and as I wrote in an earlier comment: it is so easy to misuse it for spamming.

   • Embed this notice
     Matthias Pfefferle (pfefferle@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 05:58:02 JST Matthias Pfefferle

     in reply to

     • MB

     @mbm @michael_martinez and one last argument: for me tagging is a categorization of content and if every post will have that tag, it is no longer a category of the content but of the blog/authors. So maybe we need hashtags for blogs and authors instead!