Convener: Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca>)

Participants who chose to record their names here:

• Samir Al-Battran (@samir@m.fedica.com)
• Jeremiah Lee (@Jeremiah@alpaca.gold)
• Cagan Mert Islek (@islekcaganmert.me@bsky.brid.gy)
• Julian Fietkau (@julian@fietkau.social)
• samvie (@samvie@chaos.social)
• Liaizon Wakest (@liaizon@social.wake)
• Mark Corbett Wilson (@mcorbettwilson@mastodon.social)
• Matt Baer (@matt@writing.exchange)
• Seth Goldstein (@phillycodehound@indieweb.social)

Notes

Website: https://w3id.org/fep/b2b8

Dedicated type for long-form text (Article)

• Not book length text. Approximately 5–10 minute read, 20 paragraphs. Chapters cross over the “longform text range”.
• RSS as predecessor
• Microblogging, tweets, Facebook statuses, et al came later. ActivityPub refers to this as a Note. About 1 paragraph.
• Articles also typically have titles and summaries that expand to full content, whereas Notes are expected to be show in entirety.
• Examples of servers using Article: Plume, Write Freely, Micro.blog, WordPress

Mastodon has traditionally mangled this content pretty badly

• In the past, shortened to limit of the current server, spit out without any titles, links
• This has caused other servers to do “Mastodon compatible” content.
• Many kinds of workarounds; most common is to jam everything into a Note
• Problem with Mastodon is not just with Article, but other content types being displayed incorrectly within Mastodon.

Social Web Foundation (SWF) wants to help with this kind of compatibility

Long-form text is the closest data type to short-form text I can imagine

Very important for news, publishing

HereUS already has a long-form app and plans to make it fediverse supported with what is talked on this session: https://github.com/hereus-pbc/articles

Workshop of long form publishers was convened by Social Web Foundation to make long form content work across the fediverse.

• Ghost
• WordPress
• Micro.Blog
• WriteFreely
• Threads

Outcome was https://w3id.org/fep/b2b8

• Threads now showing semantically enhanced content from Ghost
• Testing with WordPress
• WriteFreely has an update coming
• Working with Mastodon to get content working

Concept of “preview” type to allow consumers to just show it in the interface, scrub the HTML, can use it for other kinds of content

Next steps:

• Mastodon as a consumer. Difficult to get into prioritization.
• Other publishers of long form text know that it’s available and know how to use it.

Discussion starting:

What about other types of content in the preview? Example of Pixelfed not wanting an article to appear or Manyfold showing a 3D model in WebGL.

What if we also have a format for regular prints where people can create regular prints by aggregating articles by sending requests to authors. This can replace newspapers with a federated and less-budget taking model, for more independent journalism. Like, “Regular Prints” of HereUS Articles.

Any interest from microblogging platforms in publishing longer form content now? For example, Twitter now has the ability to post longer form content as well.

• Hasn’t come up in the workshop. First goal is to take the preview and show it.
• Maybe next step is instead of publisher laying out the preview, the client taking over presenting the long form text
• 3rd step: a long form reading UI
• 4th step: being a 2-way publish/consume experience

Open discussion within SWF workshop participants:

• Level of control of the consumer of the preview content
• Unexpectedly controversial point: use of the Summary object. Mastodon hijacked its use as content warning if marked as:sensitive. Some other systems show anything with a Summary is shown with a content warning. Trying to figure out how to do content warnings with long form text.
• Mastodon may only do the CW warning behavior on Notes and other content types may already be exempt from it.

The Cory Doctorow and Fediverse Report problem: wonderful to read full content in nice UI. Less wonderful in current UX with long wall of text flooding the feed.

• One aspect of Cory’s 1 paragraph = 1 Note in a thread approach is that it allows interacting with each paragraph. The Article doesn’t have that.

Samir: Our users get more engagement when using Notes threads.