[Feature request] [Pubcrawl] Send posts with titles as Article objects (always fully automatically like Friendica or with a switch)
Friendica has a nifty, while probably undocumented feature: Posts with a title go out via ActivityPub not as Note objects (= microblogging posts), but as Article objects (= long-form blog posts). Posts without a title still go out as Note objects. So adding a title changes as what kind of object a post goes out.
The advantage of this feature
This has a certain advantage on ActivityPub-based microblogging projects, actually including Mastodon: If they understand Article objects, they may display them differently from Note objects, taking the usually greater length and more advanced formatting and styling of Article objects into consideration.
Mastodon, for example, handles Article objects by only showing the title with a link to the post at its origin. And it does so with Friendica posts which have a title.
The advantage of this is that Mastodon users can see the article in its original formatting, with all images in place and in an environment where they do expect posts that are longer than 500 characters.
The problem on Hubzilla
Hubzilla, on the other hand, always sends all posts as Note objects. Projects like Mastodon show them the same way as they show microblogging posts, regardless of length. They show walls of text of thousands or tens of thousands of characters, disturbing Mastodon users who are only used to 500 characters per post. And they rip all images out of their context because they don't know image embedding and convert them into file attachments, only the last four in Mastodon's case.
Currently, the only way on Hubzilla to circumvent this is to install the Articles app, write long posts as articles and then manually write posts with links to these articles. At the same time, there is no way to keep normal Hubzilla posts from showing up in timelines on Mastodon and other ActivityPub-based microblogging projects at full length.
The solution for Hubzilla
If Hubzilla did as Friendica does, if Hubzilla sent posts with titles as Article objects, ActivityPub-based projects could handle them accordingly and would no longer show them as gigantic microblogging posts. Mastodon specifically would link to them.
This would make it possible for Hubzilla users to make full use of Hubzilla's post design and formatting features and write them as long as they want without having to worry about how they appear on Mastodon & Co.
The most basic implementation of this would be an automatic switch.
- Title empty = Note object
- Title not empty = Article object
However, at the very least, I'd add a general, channel-wide setting that either opts into or out of this feature for those who want to keep Hubzilla's current behaviour.
A more advanced implementation could additionally have a per-post switch between Note and Article which is always present but greyed out when the title is empty. When the automatic Article object feature is on, this switch is active and on if there's a title; it can be turned off. When this feature is off, and there is a title, the switch is active and off, and it can be turned on.