Automatically Cross-Post to Mastodon

[0verk1ll]

trafficstars

In the "Services" section of settings you allow posts to be automatically cross-posted to other social media like Twitter. Would you please add the ability to automatically cross-post to Mastodon. They are an open source social network similar to Diaspora. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon

[SuperTux88]

I don't know if we could add mastadon as service, because it would have different API endpoints (twitter has only one and podmins can add an API-key for twitter. For mastodon tootsuite/mastodon#780 or #7412 would probably be the better way. But mastodon wants to go the ActivityPub way and they don't want to add the diaspora protocol (which is already working and implemented by many other networks).

[Flaburgan]

I think the best scenario "the networks are able to natively talk to each others" is not going to happen in a near future, so to be able to publish to mastodon would be nice. We can assume (like we did for the other services) that to be able to link to one account per user is enough. So I would like for example to link [email protected] with [email protected] to be able to post there from diaspora*. We can use the official mastodon API for that: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon-api

@gargron can you please point us to an application using the mastodon API somewhere? We need to be able to link to a Mastodon account located on any mastodon server. How do we deal with that?

[Flaburgan]

@Gargron Up? Where should I go if I want some support for the mastodon API?

[Gargron]

Oh sorry I did not see this thread. This makes use of the mastodon-api gem, though only barely. There is also this

[DeadSuperHero]

I'm currently playing around with this, but so far have not made much real progress.

The only documentation I can currently find on adding new services is this woefully outdated document on the old Diaspora wiki.

A few other caveats:

1. Currently, the social sharing buttons use the Entypo font. Unfortunately, this font does not include the Mastodon logo (and neither does FontAwesome). Should I just use an image for this particular toggle?

2. The configuration pages for social integrations is currently very limited, in the sense that there is no place for entering options on each integration. If we add a field for entering a Mastodon instance URL, it will cause a break with the visual flow compared to the other integrations.

3. Given that Mastodon itself is decentralized, should it be possible to connect with multiple Mastodon integrations, or should users be limited to one Mastodon integration at a time?

[DeadSuperHero]

Aside from that though, some combination of omniauth-mastodon and mastodon-api gems should allow for cross-posting to work from Diaspora.

[denschub]

Should I just use an image for this particular toggle?

We could probably roll our own font. Or just embed an SVG, although this could get hard to style and would require additional CSS.

or should users be limited to one Mastodon integration at a time?

Sounds like a horrible solution.

How does mastodon implement auth? ~Do they use OpenID with dynamic client registration?~ [Edit: Nevermind, checked the docs. They reinvented the wheel with something own.] If not, how do you imagine the flow of providing API credentials and how to store them? We currently have absolutely no database infrastructure for that kind of stuff, so this task is a bit more than implementing the service.

[DeadSuperHero]

Hey @denschub , thanks for providing some insight on this.

We could probably roll our own font. Or just embed an SVG, although this could get hard to style and would require additional CSS.

Cool, good to know. I know that FontAwesome has an open issue for this; it wouldn't exactly be hard to also get a hold of the Entypo designer also. Embedding an SVG or an image would probably be a sane workaround for now, but it's kind of a semantic bummer since it's different from how the other networks are represented.

Sounds like a horrible solution.

Agreed, but users cannot have more than one integration per service when it comes to our other integrations (Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress). If we want to support multiple integrations per service, then we'd have to think about changing the logic for services.

We currently have absolutely no database infrastructure for that kind of stuff, so this task is a bit more than implementing the service.

Do you think that a prerequisite may be to restructure how Diaspora service integrations are put together?

[Flaburgan]

To be able to connect only one account seems enough to me, as you said, that's already the case for the other services.

[deutrino]

Could we spell it as "mastodon" in the issue title just for search purposes? :)

[Flaburgan]

Hey @DeadSuperHero, any progress on this? Any code pushed somewhere that we could already check?

[valvin1]

I was looking at a possiibility to cross-post to Mastodon but it looks like I have to wait ;-)

Is there other idea / possibility to do this instead of a service like Twitter ?

[VikOlliver]

If you have cross-posting to Twitter on *Diaspora, and you are using the http://moa.party bridge on Mastodon, that will re-post incoming *Diaspora tweets to Mastodon. So yes, it can be done. Maybe *Diaspora should be properly coded to do it through moa.party directly?

[norayr]

If you have cross-posting to Twitter on *Diaspora, and you are using the http://moa.party bridge on Mastodon, that will re-post incoming *Diaspora tweets to Mastodon. So yes, it can be done. Maybe *Diaspora should be properly coded to do it through moa.party directly?

i have no twitter but i have mastodon and would like to crosspost to it. otherwise i have to paste there links to my longer posts in diaspora manually. i think the federation will not solve this problem, because to me and to many mastodon and diaspora have different uses - i percieve mastodon more like a interactive chat, while diaspora to me is more like a blog platform.

[Danie10]

Wonder if there is progress on this? Seems a pity that two well established networks like Mastodon and Diaspora cannot interact with each other. Leaves the Fediverse a bit fragmented.

[VikOlliver]

Attitudes still have not changed "We don't think you should do it" seems to be the attitude. Fine, but perhaps they should consider those of us who do want to do it.

[jhass]

It's open-source, you're always free to run your own fork that implements this. If it turns out it actually works really well, is not confusing to users and not a hell to maintain we might consider to then upstream the changes :)