Steps Forward in Long-form Text
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Some quick news about the Long-form Text project at the Social Web Foundation. After the publication of the draft FEP b2b8 (“Long-form Text”), the Social Web Foundation has been working with implementers to get more support for the
Articledata type, representing multi-paragraph text on the Fediverse.One of the big pain points has been how subscribers to long-form text from platforms like WordPress, WriteFreely, Plume and Ghost.org see the text in their microblogging platforms like Mastodon or Threads. Often, the data is abbreviated or misformatted. FEP b2b8 is, in part, a way to improve and standardize this problem.
The work in this area is bearing fruit; a few weeks ago, Shubhankar Srivastava of the Fediverse team at Threads announced that Threads is now properly displaying long-form text from Ghost. This is a big step forward in support.
The participants in the project are aiming to have better standards support from both publishers and consumers over the next few months, so I’m optimistic that other platforms will see similar improvements.
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As soon as Mastodon redirects all comments with more than one paragraph back to their original site rather than displaying them inline (in other words, makes them type 'Article' and treats them just like they do 'Article' content from WordPress, Ghost, or Friendica), I'll turn on our "long-form content should be an Article" switch again. Until that day, it's going to be a Note. -
@mikedev@fediversity.site that's the eventual plan actually... The vision is Articles are sent with a
Notepreview that contains maybe a paragraph or two, and links back to the original article. Baby steps!FWIW NodeBB has already turned on "federate top level posts as Articles".
