Reword setting for pubcrawl addon

2025-06-05 21:45:42

development@hubzilla.org

Harald Eilertsen wrote the following post Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:46:09 +0200

Reword setting for pubcrawl addon

I've submitted a merge request to change the wording used in the pubcrawl settings dialogue. This is based on feedback from trying to onboard a new member to my hub, and seeing that the current wording was confusing them, and did not contain any information they could relate to.

I'm not sure the suggested wording is good enough either, so happy if anybody has any suggestions.

https://framagit.org/hubzilla/addons/-/merge_requests/447/diffs

show all 9 comments

2025-06-05 22:06:21

Scott M. Stolz

scott@loves.tech

Perhaps we should explain how articles appears on Mastodon, which is a link. I think that would be more useful information than just saying they don't comply with the spec.

2025-06-05 22:47:43

Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝

pepecyb@hub.hubzilla.hu

Serious question:

Does this setting actually work? It seemed to me that although the selection was still there, regardless of the switch setting, only a note was sent as the post type and not an article... precisely because Mastodon reduces it to a link.

I would like to actually have the choice.

And if the choice is available, then a clear text explaining the selection would of course be necessary.

2025-06-05 23:09:30

Harald Eilertsen

harald@hub.volse.no

There's two reasons I wanted a more general description, as explained in the commit message. Without knowledge of what 'article' and 'note' means in the context of ActivityPub, the the terms are meaningless.

Also there may be other tweaks needed, now or in the future, and instead of having one for each possible option this could cover them all.

I.e. do you want to optimize for compatibility with Mastodon, or follow the spec.

We can (should, probably) explain what this does behind the scenes for advanced users that want to know. But I feel that belongs in the help section rather than in the dialogue.

Wether it works or not, that's another matter :)

2025-06-05 23:21:34

Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝

pepecyb@hub.hubzilla.hu

@Harald Eilertsen

Wether it works or not, that's another matter :)

As long as the option does not do what it says, it should not appear at all, so that no user thinks that the selection will have any effect.

But you're right. The effects should be listed in a way that is easy for users to understand. The technical background is not relevant or useful at this point.

At the moment, at least, the selection seems to have no effect. I switched one of my channels to ‘Article’ in the AP app and wrote a post. It arrived on Mastodon as normal... i.e. not as a link.

2025-06-05 23:42:25

Harald Eilertsen

harald@hub.volse.no

@Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝ I agree, if it does not work it should either be removed, or the feature fixed. It's of course also possible that Mastodon has fixed their side, so the option is no longer needed.

2025-06-06 07:52:40

Mario Vavti

mario@hub.somaton.com

As @Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝ already mentioned, this is not in effect. We currently always send Create(Note) activities.

In regard to the wording, i do not think the decission to only display the title and an URL for articles is against the specification. So in any case i would not frame it like that.

In general, we should remove this setting for now and probably also the privacy groups setting. IIRC both have no effect (would need to look it up though to be sure).

2025-06-06 09:05:44

Harald Eilertsen

harald@hub.volse.no

I've updated the MR to remove the setting instead.

2025-06-06 11:08:54

Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝

pepecyb@hub.hubzilla.hu

@Mario Vavti @Harald Eilertsen

Am I remembering correctly, or am I just imagining things? It used to be (when the option was introduced) that if you selected that option, ‘Article’ was actually sent.

I think I tried it back then and saw that ‘Article’ actually only appeared as the title and link (if available) on Mastodon.

Then the option was initially set to default = ‘Note’... and sometime shortly afterwards, the option was made non-functional.

I recently searched for the discussion about this, but couldn’t find it.

Unfortunately, I can't remember why the option was removed completely...

2025-06-06 12:14:27

Der Pepe (Hubzilla) ⁂ ⚝

pepecyb@hub.hubzilla.hu

Aaaah... now I've found it: https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/display/c7d17d1a-f9f3-46e9-938a-ff1bf98feb6d