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Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by nutomic@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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There have been some requests to make it possible for Mastodon users to create threads on Lemmy. At the moment this is not possible because Mastodon cant set the title field which is mandatory in Lemmy. The same problem affects other projects like Pleroma or Friendica (where title is optional).

It is unlikely that Mastodon would make any change in this regard, so a workaround in Lemmy would be necessary. I implemented such a workaround which makes the title optional when receiving a federated post, and uses the first line of the content instead. This workaround could also be made configurable per instance or per community.

But to be honest I am not sure the workaround is a good idea in general, as it could result in bad titles, and generally more low-quality posts. Thats why I want to know what the community thinks about it.

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[–] Sal@mander.xyz 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I think that using the first line up to maybe ~10 words followed by "..." as a default is a good idea. It would still be nice to have a preferred format to indicate the title, such as:

***
@asklemmy@lemmy.ml | Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?

Post content
----

Another possibility would be to reject a post if it is lacking the title and have the 'community' send a direct message or reply to the user letting them know the correct format. A correctly formatted posted using the first sentence could be generated and included in the direct message as an example. It could say something like this:

Are you trying to create a post in a lemmy instance? If so, please create the toot again including a title. Here is an example using the first sentence of your post as a title:

@community.lemmy.ml | First sentence

Post content

Approach one is good because it does not require one to be familiar with the format at all, but it can lead to some awkward titles. Approach two would require a slightly higher amount of effort from the poster, but one failed post should be enough for them to become familiar with the syntax.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

You don't even need a special format. If you remove the pipe in your first example, that's a normal microblog post. It would look perfectly normal and readable for other microblog users and lemmy could parse it into a representation that fits its UI easily (The @acct will be the community its posted to and the first line, up to a newline, punctuation character, or max character limit, will be the title.)

Examples

@asklemmy@lemmy.ml Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?

Yes they should. I don't see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

would parse to something like

{
  "to": "lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy",
  "title": "Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?",
  "content": "Yes they should. I don't see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
}

@asklemmy@lemmy.ml Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy? Yes they should. I don't see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

would parse to the same thing because it could use the ? as delimiter.

[–] tmpod@lemmy.pt 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah, I like this. Easy and familiar