let's bring #longform (text) support to the #photoverse
(this is not (mainly) about long texts on #pixelfed or #vernissage (they can both fall back to show the summary), it is about supporting image posts with the object type: `Article`)
* https://github.com/VernissageApp/VernissageServer/pull/442
* https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/pull/6458
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/b2b8/fep-b2b8.md
@pfefferle I see. Yeah, in Micro.blog we often have long-form blog posts that are actually a photo album: a title, maybe a little bit of text, and a dozen photos.
@manton isn't that a better fit for a text object with attachments?
@mariusor @pfefferle If we did that, there could be some data loss… The user could have text in between each photo. It seems better to put the content out in the fediverse in the best format and if other platforms want to simplify or toss out some data, that’s okay.
@manton one way you could do this is by uploading the images, then adding the URLs as attachments, while at the same time they can be linked inline in the text content.
Of course this would be way too much to handle for Mastodon, but from an ActivityPub point of view it makes sense and doesn't require any hand wavy solutions.
In my one user ActivityPub web-app, I have all the moving parts I described above working, but they haven't come together just yet, because the UI for posting is just a CLI tool and it's difficult to describe in markdown an image that hasn't yet been uploaded with a stable URL. But writing this gave me an idea... 🤔
@mariusor @manton that is what WordPress is already doing (keeping media inline and adding it as attachments).
here is an example: https://browser.pub/https%3A%2F%2Factivitypub.blog%2F2026%2F01%2F12%2Fwordpress-federation-recap-of-2025%2F
@pfefferle This is a nice FEP. I’ve been waiting to support Article until I had a better idea of how Mastodon handles displaying them. Have y’all done much testing of that?
@manton It works quite nice on most of the text based platforms, but as I learned with my toot: we have to improve the way how blogs can best interop with the #photoverse without beeing spammy or federate unrelated featured/stock images.
@pfefferle@mastodon.social Boo, Pixelfed is for pictures, don’t fuck up a replacement for instagram with extraneous bullshit just because a rare user wants their own vision to screw things up for the real users, photographers and photographer’s aficionados.
@jaypeach53 thanks for your feedback!
@pfefferle i think pixelfed is the wrong client/platform if you want to read articles
The more we keep thinking in terms of "platforms", the longer it will take us to make the open social web a reality.
PixelFed-the-backend could well be a "Generic" ActivityPub Server, separate from "PixelFed the nice way to browse and organize image posts".
@ricferrer as I said in my toot "(this is not (mainly) about long texts on #pixelfed or #vernissage (they can both fall back to show the summary), it is about supporting image posts with the object type: `Article`)"
@pfefferle thanks for clarifying. The image in the object article is secondary and I think it doesn’t make sense without the context of the article where it’s attached. I just don’t see the real value in seeing jt my feed. Specifically because sometimes the images for articles are a bit random, are stock photos or even graphics to try to depict the concept of the article.
@ricferrer but that is not the point of the discussion! this is already a problem, because if you change the post type to `Note`, pixelfed will show it, even with the full text.
If spam or unrelevant images are the problem, than this can not (only) be fixed by blocking the `Article` type.
