Mastodon's previews for Article-type objects still link to the original
instead of rendering the content itself, but now they also include the
summary along with the title; CW: long (over 3,000 characters), Fediverse
meta, Fediverse-beyond-Mastodon meta, quote-post
Artikel ansehen
Zusammenfassung ansehen
Okay, while this is not optimal, I'd say it comes close enough to an improvement to be of importance.
Some of us know what it's like to send Article-type objects (and long-form content should always be these according to the ActivityPub spec) to Mastodon. Now, Mastodon's handling of long-form content has changed, believe it or not. Something that neither Friendica nor Hubzilla nor (streams) nor Forte could ever achieve happened under pressure from Flipboard (commercial player), Ghost (quickly growing Substack alternative that's trying to attract professional and commercial users), Automattic (the owner of WordPress) and NodeBB (fairly big bulletin-board forum player that added ActivityPub a while ago).
So much I should say in advance: No, Mastodon does not fully render Article-type objects in their full HTML-formatted glory from the title to dozens of embedded images. Mastodon's own Web interface isn't geared towards that, and neither is any Mastodon app, official or third-party.
Instead, Mastodon still handles Article-type objects by linking to the original like it used to. But it used to show only the title if there was one. If there was no title, all that Mastodon showed was a plain URL. If there was a summary, Mastodon did as Mastodon always does and has been done since 2017, regarded it as a content warning and hid the whole "post" with the title (if there was one) and the link behind it.
What Mastodon does now is finally acknowledge that some software out there actually uses the summary field as a summary field.
The preview with the link to the original now also contains the summary, along with the title. If there is either, of course.
So if you're on something that can send or always sends Article-type objects (specialised blogging software, Friendica, (streams), Forte), it's well worth adding a summary to those posts that go out as Article-type objects.
(Speaking of Friendica: Dear Friendica users, please substitute any use of "summary" in this post with "abstract" if you don't know what I'm talking about.) Re: Long-form articles
The long form content "movement" (of which I'm adjacent to but not fully involved) started up because two big implementors, Ghost and WordPress, were running into the same issues AP devs have been seeing this whole time, that Mastodon reduces articles to a title and link.
The difference is devs got together and pushed for changes, and got them done. Mastodon no longer treats articles the way they used to.
Now you can send in a summary that is used, and that gets you heaps closer to a better UX than what came before.
The long form text FEP aims to provide a way to send an alternative representation for the ubiquitous microblog software on the fediverse, in the form of a note, while still maintaining the use of other objects types (e.g. article) #
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Summary
