"Microblog" support

[clemensv]

In my fork, I'll be implementing specific support for "Microblog" entries like Twitter/Mastodon that are quick thoughts and do not have titles.

Titleless entries

The way you'll signal the difference for a particular post is that you simply omit the title. RSS permits this and the posts will just be added to the feed as usual.

For display, two or three sentences look very lonely on a page, though.

Therefore, all posts without titles will be dynamically aggregated into "virtual" blog posts. The generated title of that post indicates the date range of the aggregated posts. The aggregation is interrupted by any blog post with a title. Aggregation of further posts without titles resumes after such a post, so that "full" posts and aggregate pages interleave.

Every such "short post" is suffixed with a link icon (shown below as #) that allows copying its permalink. The permalink always resolves to an aggregation page on which the post resides and then scrolls to the correct anchor.

The virtual aggregate page's hyperlink is based on the date-time at which the aggregation starts, which means that an aggregate can always be created from that point in time on forward even if the "start" post was deleted. If the aggregate comes up empty, meaning it immediately hits a post with a title in the chronology, the request redirects to that post. If the request date is past the last available post overall, it redirects to home.

Comments. What happens to comments?

Short answer: No title, no (direct, local) comments.

A short post doesn't have direct support for comments on the site. Instead, each post will have a shortcut icon to allow sharing the post on Twitter/Mastodon and people can comment there. The idea is to inspect link referrers from select sites to find such discussions/mentions and surface them.

With ActivityPub we will eventually learn about such relationships via protocol and can also surface them.

All such detected referrals/relationships are collected for each post as if they were comments, but it's required to use an external site.

As soon as a post has external referrals of that kind, they will be displayable in a thread view of sorts.

That same threading view will also work for when any local post refers to a local post.

Example for illustration

Some post with a title

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

December 30, 2022 - January 4, 2023 [<-- this]

Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr. #

At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. #

Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. #

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla. #

Some other post with a title

Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit.

[shanselman]

Thoughts on what these should look like in RSS? Would you also batch them by day? I feel like traditional Feedly users might not like this experience

[AlexZeitler]

Maybe make them available having a separate "Microblog" feed so people can opt-in without messing up their main feed - AFAIK has been able to generate feeds by category. "Microblog" could be just another category then.