Article vs. Note (redux!) — summary of current implementations

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] I'd recommend we discuss the merits and complexities of media caching separately, if only because I'm certain we could bikeshed that one for days!

tallship

@silverpill @jupiter_rowland @renchap @mikedev @julian

Socialhome supports inline images in posts. Are those as:Note or as:Article?

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

I think they're as:Note just like streams. Hopefully we can soon move them all to as:Article like I proposed 7-8 years ago and everything will look as the authors intended and everybody will be happy.

a

julian: But a part of me worries that we're heading down this road trying to figure out whether we can heuristically determine an object type, when we should be asking whether we should. We shouldn't, in general -- the difference is one of formality and intent, as I tried to explain above. The litmus test I described is not a hard-and-fast rule, but it gets at the core of the issue more closely than most other tests. I realize there's a bit of exception where the object is "top-level", and you could also write an entire Article in reply to a Note. But a Note is largely intended in context of your profile's feed of status updates. You're sharing something informally among other informally-shared things. Only when it rises in formality do you make it an Article. I'm not sure what the threshold or exact definition of formality is, but it ultimately falls to the user and not the software to make that decision. Even if the user's choice is something like "I will use my blogging software to formally reply to this" vs "I'm just making a social media post,". The software could be multimodal and support authoring both Notes and Articles, also.

Jupiter Rowland

@tallship @silverpill Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams) support inline images in everything. But they don't use media cache because they themselves embed their images from their built-in managed file space.

Friendica sends posts as:Note when they have a title and as:Article when they don't, so it supports both. Hubzilla and (streams) could theoretically send both, but they only send Note-type objects out of protest against Mastodon's refusal to render Article-type objects to their full extent.

silverpill

@tallship I don't know. Could you provide an example of such post?

@julian

julian

@[email protected]:

Could you provide an example of such post?

I believe @[email protected] was referring to the fact that the software itself supports inline images locally. Well, sure, who doesn't? (Except for Mastodon lol)

The problem lies with everybody federating as:Note out because Mastodon doesn't render content otherwise, and also that all images are stripped out unless included as attachment, and only then, in reverse order with a cap at 4 images.

cc @[email protected]

tallship

@silverpill @julian

Silverpill wrote:
> Could you provide an example of such post?

Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.

I'll try to give it a boost from my #Mitra, #Hubzilla, and #Friendica accounts too (if I haven't already) so you can study/compare the various treatment cases

Sadly, I have not yet launched streams yet for study. I know, I'm a lame-O. I'll get to it shortly, prolly just spin up a local VM on Proxmox for that here, I really am anxious to give it a go

#tallship #inline_media

.

silverpill

@tallship @julian

>Here you go bro: Socialhome post w/inline images.

It is a Note. I think this is a good example of a post which is best viewed on the original site.

Matt Baer

I'm still catching up on the whole discussion, but I'd mention that WriteFreely sends out Articles by default, with a config option to send Notes instead.

I've experimented with automatically falling back to Note if a post has only one paragraph, but agreed that's not a great distinction. (And I don't think an automatic switch should be needed for a platform like ours.)

Definitely inclined to agree with @trwnh that intent makes the difference. Since WF is meant for blogging / long-form, where each Actor has a unique webpage, Article was the easy choice. The hope was that other platforms would figure out UX on the other end eventually.

julian

Thanks @[email protected]! That's good feedback and it's really exciting to know that there exist implementors out there whose default is not Note.

I think at this point a real-time discussion at the next ForumWG re: the distinction between Article vs. Note would be beneficial. It'd be a continuation of the discussion we had last month.

It's clear there are varied opinions on it, but as intimated by others, this might not actually be a problem that has technical solution.