Elad has programmed a holiday gift for DU -- (limited) Mastodon embedding is now available

[EarlG]

This discussion thread was locked by EarlG (a host of the Announcements group).

As you know, tweets and YouTube videos can be automatically embedded on DU by simply entering the URL of the tweet or video into the body of your post. Elad has now added functionality so that Mastodon posts (toots) can be embedded in the same way.

In addition, links to Mastodon feeds and profiles can now be posted without the link breaking.

There are some caveats!

First, this is VERY experimental, so you may experience unexpected issues. If you see anything that looks like it's working incorrectly, please feel free to contact me via DU Mail.

Second, because Mastodon is a decentralized system, there is no single "top level" domain -- like "twitter.com" or "youtube.com" -- to point at. This creates some issues for us, but the bottom line is that we essentially have to have a list of "approved" Mastodon servers that our embedding will work for.

We've started with a short list of six of the most popular servers that many journalists are using. So as of now, embedding only works for the following servers:

mastodon.online
journa.host
mastodon.social
mstdn.social
mas.to
mastodon.world

Please note that if you link to any other server, it will show up as just a link, not an embed. If this all keeps working as intended, we will look at adding additional servers in the new year.

To embed a toot, simply copy the URL of the individual toot and paste it into the body of your DU post. (If you're looking at a Mastodon feed, you can go to the individual toot by clicking the text in the body of the toot.)

Then when you post, it should show up like this:

So again, if you spot any issues please let me know -- otherwise, hope you enjoy

[SheltieLover]

1. Ty EarlG & Elad!

Happy Holidays!

[Yonnie3]

2. a quick test, comment and thank you to Elad

It seems I have to actually go to the home server to get a URL

Those URLs don't seem to be available on my local server so I had to go to the home server of the toot I want to link.

https://cville.online/@[e-mail]/109557453241843748
works if you click it. It goes to mastodon.social unless I'm logged in to cville.online and then goes there.

I went to the server mastodon.social, searched and found the toot.

This is good.

[2naSalit]

3. Cool! Thank you!

Happy Holly-daze!

[TeamProg]

4. K&R Thanks for posting. n/t

[erronis]

5. That's great. Wonder if mastodon will someday become the plaything of a twit (twoot).

Any plans to allow images to be directly embedded? I think I know there are a lot of issues including access rights, server storage, and appropriateness....

[ancianita]

6. Very smart, cool, thoughtful. Thank you, Elad.

Happy holidays!

[IronLionZion]

7. Love sniffing out these toots on DU

Thank you Elad and EarlG!

[edbermac]

8. Who has mastodon accounts there?

Looking at it and puzzled about what to sign up for; book readers, San Franciscans, Celtic paganism?

Is there a general group to create an account for?

[demmiblue]

12. I just looked to see what server many of the people I follow on Twitter are on.

At first, I tried mastodon.social, but they were not accepting new accounts. I ended up starting an account on mastodon.world ( to Ali Velshi).

https://mastodon.world/explore

[live love laugh]

45. I selected mstdn.plus which just reopened to new users.

[SergeStorms]

9. Always improving, without being asked....

that's what makes DU special. Thank you, EarlG and Elad.

[demmiblue]

10. Testing:

[marble falls]

11. This is great, now if my technology challenged brain could only take advantange of it ...

... thanks for taking such good care of DUers as well as keeping DU functional AND useful.

[4now]

13. This is great news

[NullTuples]

14. THANK YOU! Any chance of NOT boosting journa.host ?

"Journalists signing up on mastodon at the journa.host server should know that the server has quickly gained a reputation for transphobia and has been widely banned/blocked. So if you are using http://journa.host as your home server, you should know that people on many of those servers can't find or follow you, and won't be able to see your content on their feeds. Some of the servers banning you are major ones, too."

[EarlG]

15. Well... shit

I feel like this might end up as a short lived experiment then, if this is what’s going to happen on Mastodon.

The problem is that we can’t just blanket-allow embedding from every Mastodon server (this is to do with security on DU) so we have to pick and choose which servers we allow to embed. This gives the appearance of preferring or “boosting” those servers.

Obviously I don’t want to boost servers which are known for welcoming/promoting bigotry.

But I simply do not have the time or energy to be constantly worrying about the various moderation policies of Mastodon servers. I can’t field complaints all day about something someone said or did on a Mastodon server somewhere — even if that content has not been posted on DU — as if I’m responsible for it. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

The thing about Twitter embedding is that the focus is on the individual. Is there all kinds of bigotry all over Twitter? Yes, but you’re okay to embed tweets on DU as long as you’re not promoting that specific bigoted content on DU.

But now with Mastodon, it seems we might have to worry about the “middle-man” — it’s not good enough to say “don’t embed that bigoted post,” now we have to say “even if the post itself isn’t bigoted, don’t embed posts from that bigoted server.”

I suspect it would take a significant amount of effort to keep on top of which servers are acceptable and which aren’t, so we might just have to stop embedding altogether.

The good news is that even if embedding does have to go away, at least just regular links to Mastodon posts now also work on DU (previously they would break). So at least that’s been fixed…

Edited to add: I did a bit of googling into whether journa.host is bigoted and not much came up. I found that one tweet you referenced and read the replies, and honestly I could barely parse out what had actually happened. It seems somebody posted something allegedly transphobic from the NYT, someone complained about it and got banned, there was an uproar…

Does this mean we should not embed posts from journa.host? I don’t know… but the bottom line is that DU is more than enough for me to worry about without having to keep up with fights over other people’s moderating decisions. I hope that makes sense…

[NullTuples]

18. I understand, and that's my fear about Masto too.

Because each instance/server has to have its own connector coded, inclusion by another site becomes a choice. And each choice becomes a de facto statement of endorsement.

I don't envy you, as I think perhaps "uproars" like this are intentionally part of the structure of Mastodon. There are no rules except those each instance sets for itself and its users. If they deem a user's links to be harmful, they can block the user posting them. If they deem another instance as harmful, they'll disconnect from it, to varying degrees. If one of their users doesn't agree, changing to another instance which does not block it is a matter of clicking a button. The goal is a self-governing system.

The problem for outside sites is they need to vet each instance they allow links to, just as each instance administrators must do. Perhaps the answer is to simply code connectors to the top x instances by user count or traffic. Or perhaps just a bit more active selection is needed.

A few other perspectives on the matter, if it helps:

"Journalists want to re-create Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it."
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalists-want-to-recreate-twitter-on-mastodon-mastodon-is-not-into-it.php

"An update on Journa.host"
https://blog.infosec.exchange/2022/11/20/an-update-on-journa-host/

Finally, however you decide to handle this, thank you for everything you do and have done here.

[EarlG]

19. Very interesting, thanks

For the record, the reason we started this mini-project in the first place was because previously, our software was breaking links to Mastodon posts due to the "@" symbol in the links, and we needed to fix that. Once we fixed that issue, we thought it would be cool to allow embedding of Mastodon posts just as we allow embedding of Twitter and YouTube content. Then we ran into the second issue, which is that there's no "top-level" domain to approve, which complicates things from a security perspective. Therefore we chose to start by allowing embeds for just a handful of servers which we understood to be popular with mainstream journalists.

But this has now taken us down the fediverse rabbit hole where things are a bit more complicated than I first realized.

To be completely clear, DU does not software-block links to any site, anywhere. You can post a link to Stormfront or an incel Reddit just as you can post a link to the Guardian or Mother Jones. BUT, if you're posting a link to an extremely dubious source, context is all-important. While it may not always produce the desired results 100% of the time -- depending on your point of view -- the combination of DU's rules, self-selecting member group, and peer-based moderating system is a pretty powerful deterrent. So if you're going to post something way outside the mainstream of DU, then you'd better be extremely clear about why you're doing it (and even then, Juries are not particularly tolerant of links to highly bigoted sources, no matter what the context.)

In other words, the choice to keep or remove content on DU remains, for the most part, in the hands of the membership at large. Whereas the choice to completely block links to other sources would be a top-down, admin-level decision. That's what Mastodon admins are getting themselves into, and I don't really envy them for it.

Take Fox News for example. Obviously most DU members do not watch Fox News or read the Fox News website. But sometimes, somebody will want to link to something over there for other DUers to point and laugh at (OMG, look at this appalling Sean Hannity op-ed!). Or on very rare occasions, Fox News might even produce a legitimate news story that is actually worth linking to (!).

If you choose to post something from Fox News, we leave it up to you to decide how you want to contextualize it, and we leave it up to your peers to decide whether your choice is appropriate. What we do NOT do is decide for everybody that links to Fox News are verboten, and just block the site at a software level.

But it seems that that is how the fediverse operates. If DU was a Mastodon server and Fox News was a Mastodon server, you can bet that I'd be inundated with requests to defederate from Fox News, and if I didn't I'd probably be accused of being a Fox News lover or right-winger or some such. Each Mastodon admin is on the hook to decide which sources they should connect to and which they should block. As someone who has been a forum admin for twenty-plus years, that adds a whole new nightmarish level of moderation that I'm glad I don't have to consider.

Although it seems that by just making DU Mastodon-adjacent, I now DO have to consider it

Again to be clear, you can link to literally any Mastodon post on any server -- DU's software does not prevent that. And if I could, I would simply allow embedding of posts from all Mastodon servers, just as I allow embedding of all tweets or all YouTube videos. But since I can't do that for technical reasons, I'm left with a situation where I have to pick and choose which servers I allow embedding to. And it seems that even my initial selection of six seemingly-innocent servers popular with journalists has potentially caused a problem.

That's why I'm saying that I might have to prevent Mastodon embedding altogether. If I can't allow embedding from all servers, I should probably disallow embedding from all servers, otherwise there's an appearance of favoring certain servers by allowing them to be embedded. And that's the part I'm never going to be able to keep up with -- figuring out which servers are or are not "acceptable" at any given moment.

So anyway -- thanks again, I'm glad you can see where I'm coming from, and your posts have given me plenty of food for thought.

[BootinUp]

23. I think the question is whether a site has a good moderation policy

and whether they appear to be following it. Not whether someone posts something ugly or even whether there has been a complaint, but then what. If you want I can try to investigate any resources for making the job you are talking about "easy".

[EarlG]

28. I appreciate that, but I just want to be clear about what I'm talking about

This whole "defederation" business is a Mastodon thing. I'm not going to, and never will, create a software block which disallows links to any Mastodon server -- or anywhere else on the Internet for that matter.

All I'm talking about is directly embedding toots in DU posts. Unfortunately we cannot blanket-allow every single Mastodon post to be embedded on DU for technical reasons. Therefore if we are going to allow embedding, we have to hand-select servers from which toots can be embedded.

I selected the six servers above because someone on Reddit posted a huge list of journalists who were on Mastodon, and those seemed to be the servers that most of them were using. I didn't do a single second of research into the servers or their moderation policies. Hand-selecting those servers is not an endorsement by me of those servers, or their moderation policies, or anything else -- I was simply trying to allow DU embedding of toots by as many journalists as I could, for the purposes of this initial experiment.

Although as I'm now becoming aware, by selecting those servers, it may appear that I am endorsing them -- and therein lies the problem.

When I see a toot from, say, Anne Applebaum in my OP, I should be interested in the content of the toot. I don't want to have to think, "That's a interesting toot by a Pulitzer-prize winning historian, but before I decide if I can appreciate it or not, there's a whole complicated backstory about the server it's posted on which I have to go research first."

As far as I'm concerned there's barely any difference between an embed and a link. It's mostly just convenience. With a link you have to go somewhere else to read the content (unless someone has copied and pasted the content already) whereas with an embed the content is right in front of you. Ideally we would be able to embed every single toot, like we can embed every single tweet, but if we can't do that then we might just have to embed no toots at all, simply because hand-selecting certain servers creates an appearance of favoritism -- it suggests that by selecting those servers, I'm endorsing them. I'm not.

Bottom line is that if hand-selecting servers to embed means that me or anyone else is going to have to keep up with whatever scandal du jour is going on over at Mastodon, then I think we might be better off not allowing embedding and just letting people link to toots instead. I started reading the other reply you made just below, and I appreciate the effort you put in, but I don't want to have to be parsing through stuff like that on a regular basis.

[BootinUp]

24. Its not even half the story. Thumbsdown

Thread where the quote came from.

Link to tweet

?lang=en


Aja Romano Profile picture
Aja Romano

Twitter logo
Nov 20 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
🧵Journalists signing up on mastodon at the journa[.]host server should know that through no deliberate fault (that i can tell), the server has quickly gained a reputation for transphobia and has been widely banned/blocked.
So if you are using journa.host as your home server, you should know that people on many of those servers can't find or follow you, and won't be able to see your content on their feeds. Some of the servers banning you are major ones, too, like mastodon.art.

Mastodon
Journa.host is a reliable home for journalists on Mastodon.
http://journa.host

Mastodon.ART
Mastodon.ART — Your friendly home on the fediverse for all things creative, all on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free. NO CRYPTOART / NFTs ALLOWED.
http://mastodon.art
I'll spend the rest of this thread trying to unpack why this is happening (it's complicated?) but the bottom line is that the server is tainted and now its reputation precedes it. If you're using it, that may well extend to you, too, as you try to network there.
There are 3 main reasons for the bannings as far as i can tell.

1) The server used a scrape tool that came from k*w*f*rms. I can't find any details at all regarding how they found this tool, and they have since stopped using it.

This has naturally made people think the whole server is transphobic, because wtf how would they get a tool from KWF unless they were affiliated with KWF?! I'd love to have more context for the k*w*f*rms thing if anyone knows; if their only association is a single dev tool, then+
—i'm not sure that justifies labeling them as transphobic; they could have gotten the tool some other way, and they stopped using it. And it seems to be more complicated than that; their mods skew liberal to progressive, and one of them is trans.
2) Mike Pesca, fired from slate for defending his right to use the N-word, posted a transphobic NYT article and allegedly the first thing the journa[.]host mods did was ban another user for complaining that they hadn’t banned Pesca. (cont'd)
I say allegedly because the only post I can find about this has since been deleted. (It probably says something about how difficult it is to access info on mastodon that i've spent HOURS searching for info about this today and all i can come up with is a single deleted post.)
The mods did eventually also ban Pesca, so that interaction is also gone, but here's a screenshot of Parker Molloy yelling at him

The third reason is a lot more nebulous and has to do with the nature of journalism on the internet. It's not connected, but a lot of servers who really seem to distrust journalists on principle are using "they're transphobic" to justify their hostility in this case.

Because so little of this is transparent and source-able, it's really hard for me to parse how much of this is just negative spin and how much of it is valid concern. The journa[.]host server skews liberal blue-check journalist overall and has lots of influential users;
the server also recently got a boost from CUNY's school of journalism and @jeffjarvis

Jeff Jarvis (@[e-mail])
I'm proud to announce that we at the Newmark Journalism School's Tow-Knight Center provided initial funding for the journa.host Mastodon instance that @[e-mail] and a team of volunteer…

I'm flummoxed about this because i want to follow many journalists on journa[.]host. the server has lots of professional support behind it and honestly seems...fine?? but i also feel obligated to warn other journalists away from using it at this point.
I'm not trying to suggest that journa[.]host doesn't deserve its reputation for transphobia, either, just admitting that i can't *source* that reputation. Meanwhile what i can source doesn't really tell me much. Please let me know if you have any more info!
Bonus: A lot of servers have also begun to blacklist mastodon.social for a bunch of reasons including its size and lack of heavy moderation. If banning whole servers instead of individual people is really the prevailing 🦣cultural norm, i'm not sure that's sustainable.

Mastodon
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit
https://mastodon.social
Aha! Parker Molloy *was* the banned journalist and also thinks banning the whole server is a bad move
Unroll available on Thread Reader

Link to tweet

Clarification about the KWF thing from server creator Adam Davidson:

Link to tweet

*correction, Pesca was suspended from Slate, not fired
• • •

[BootinUp]

26. OLD NEWS This is over a month old!

[BootinUp]

27. So the fascist owned site is ok though? Bad joke sorry. But the poster above

is blowing up an old story and giving you misleading information. The end.

[EarlG]

29. I guess this is what I'm talking about

It really doesn't matter who's right and who's wrong in this situation. The point is that no matter what, the moderation policies of various Mastodon servers are their own business. I wanted to be able to allow toots from individuals to be embedded on DU, just as we allow tweets from individuals to be embedded. The moderation policies of the servers that those toots are posted on seems to be somewhat beside the point.

But at the end of the day, it's NOT beside the point -- if me allowing toot embedding from a handful of Mastodon servers is going to cause unnecessary friction on DU, then I think we might have to remove the embedding feature again.

[BootinUp]

30. If you aren't interested in any research I might do then thats cool.

you seem to be presuming there aren't solutions to the dilemna. Like DU is the only web site with these issues? Not. Sure back off the feature for now if its got you worried, that may be smart, but people will solve your concerns probably on other sites. Later.

[EarlG]

32. Embedding is going to be here for a little while

Like I said, it’s an experiment.

What I wasn’t anticipating was that there might be issues with the appearance of me endorsing specific servers. If people view DU embedding certain servers as an endorsement of those servers and their policies, I’m not sure there’s a way around that — other than keeping an up to date list of “approved” servers which seems like a ton of work for somebody (and then inevitable conflicts when that list doesn’t include a server somebody likes, or includes a server that somebody doesn’t like).

Once again, just so nobody misunderstands me, I’m not talking about blocking linking to Mastodon servers. Linking to any server will always be permitted. This is about embedding.

I mean it makes sense to me why this is an issue. DU allows links to Free Republic and I don’t endorse their moderating policies. But obviously if we came up with a special tool so that people could embed Free Republic posts on DU, that might raise some eyebrows. I had just not considered this angle with Mastodon embedding, thinking it to be just a useful way of getting journalists’ posts embedded in order to help provide a Twitter alternative, if that’s what people want. Turns out I may have been a bit naive in that assumption…

[BootinUp]

34. Thank you for the clarification

Yes, embedding and linking are two different things. And I was obviously a little excited for DU and mastodon at the new feature. Perhaps this could be moderated as part of the normal DU moderation system which I participate in when I can. So, somehow we manage to keep a liberal list (not a safe list). Those links from the liberal list can be killed from the list by a DU jury. The liberal list can be added to by DU Star members. The safe list is built in a second and less frequent process to be determined.

[EarlG]

38. Even if embedding does turn out to be a problem

we will still always allow linking to any post anywhere in the Mastodon system — this mini-project actually got started because links to toots were breaking on DU because of a technical problem, and that’s now been fixed so those links work properly. That piece isn’t going to change.

And as always, once content from elsewhere has been linked on DU, it’s up to DUers serving on Juries to determine if the content meets our standards.

None of that is really an issue — as far as a Jury is concerned, most of the time it it won’t matter what server a toot is posted on, what will matter is the content of the individual toot. The source of the toot might provide additional context for jurors, or it might not — that’s absolutely no different than the way it works for all other websites that get linked on DU.

The only part I’m concerned about is the direct embedding part. But even if I ultimately decide that direct embedding isn’t going to work out, linking to toots will never be blocked on DU.

[BootinUp]

39. Thanks. One last suggestion

In my du profile add a place for my mastodon address. If my du points are above a certain level then mastodon instances in user profiles mastodon address are allowed to be embedded.

[EarlG]

41. Hmm, interesting idea

There may be something to that, or at least something similar. It would require quite a bit of work to figure out though and we have a ton of other priorities at the moment... I think I’ll just say for now that we’ll see how this current experiment pans out, but how to best integrate Mastodon will be something that we definitely continue to consider going forward.

[BootinUp]

42. cool. Thanks EarlG

[BootinUp]

40. That could work. I know databases and sql

And computer code in general. So to be more specific: there is a field or fields in a user profile where they can white list mastodon instances, so they can embed a post from those instances in his profile. But that feature is only working if above 90 or more points for example. Piece of cake for elad. :sheepish grin::

[BootinUp]

37. I think there already is a safe list of mastodon instances

its the list that is maintained by mastodon.org and offered as to new signups on their main non-profit organization website. So that way you can always embed message that the organization says are safe. A more liberal list could be created, maintained by DU Star Members, and or juries.

[Ms. Toad]

31. Removing it is probably a good decision.

The inherent nature of Fediverse has been my main concern about Mastadon, generally. I've been focused on accessibility - my goal has been to move my twitter-like communications to an entity which makes accessibility the default. For example - a default alt text box popping up whenever an image is posted so that a user must make a conscious decision that their image NOT be accessible, rather than the default being that it is.

Creating that kind of intentional inclusiveness is impossible when the administrators of each server is free to make whatever rules they want. The same is true for LGBT-inclusiveness,

I have no particular knowledge as to journa.host and trans-hostility, although it is an issue near and dear to my heart. After a very brief initial exploration I decided Mastadon was not capable of being a place I wanted to hang out so I never got beyond exploring the general question to thinking about individual servers. My decision to go to Post.news is largely - for reasons similar to those you have discovered - everyone doing their own thing makes it impossible to have uniform moderation, accessibility, LGBTQ-friendly, etc. policies because Mastadon isn't "A" thing, it is thousands of things (7500 servers is one estimate I've seen). As you have pointed out - sorting out which ones have policies compatible with DU would both take an enormous amount of time, and inherently serve as a DU endorsement of some.

That said, I'm glad you got the link thing figured out!

[BootinUp]

33. Mastodon has been a great experience. You do not know what you are missing Ms. Toad.

The alt-text behavior is a good point. I might even try to submit a request to have that put into the official mastodon software. Cya.

[Ms. Toad]

35. I do.

I explored it when it came up as an alternative to twitter.

Not intersted in the interface. Not interested in the Wild-wild-west form of governance. I know the centralized form of governance also has issues (e.g. Twitter), but the decentralized form has more, in my experience. (I hadn't thought of the implications for sharing on sites outside of Mastadon, but that is another reason dislike the decentralized nature, in my opinion.

Post.news is a better alternative, in my opinion.

[BootinUp]

36. It is the "wild wild west part" that I have to argue about

I know wild wild west and mastodon on the instance you choose will not be a wild wild west. Universeodon is not a wild wild west. It does request alt-text IIRC. I have only posted an image once. I see on github there is plenty of discussion about accessibility.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/search?q=accessibility&type=discussions

The interface is good because you choose the interface. There are multiple apps and you will quickly get recommendations from people you are following if you ask for them. Both apps and the web interface are getting improvements frequently.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

[BootinUp]

22. Where is your quote coming from please?

Here is the about page from that server:

journa.host
Decentralized social media powered by Mastodon

ADMINISTERED BY:
info
Journa.Host Admin Team
@info
CONTACT:
[e-mail]
About
Journa.host is a reliable home for journalists on Mastodon. Our thousands of members are working and retired journalists, academics focused on the media, and others who are clearly journalism-related professionals.

JournaHost is a collective entity under the financial sponsorship of Open Collective, a 501c3 nonprofit.

A volunteer group of journalists manages the collective on behalf of the community. JournaHost is in the process of forming its own 501c3 entity.

Our DMCA Registration Number is DMCA-1043718. DMCA Section 512 notices may be submitted using this form.

To verify journalists are who they say they are, we are developing a set of protocols that allow journalists to confirm their identity, so that admission to journa.host signals that members are, indeed, verified journalists. Professional journalists who want to join journa.host should complete this form.

Initial funding is provided by the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, CUNY.

Moderators

Adam Davidson, founder of NPR’s Planet Money; former staff writer, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, [e-mail]

Todd A. Price, enterprise reporter for USA Today Network’s South region, [e-mail]

Evan Urquhart, founder of Assigned Media, community manager for Slate, [e-mail]

Steven I. Weiss, award-winning investigative journalist, [e-mail]

Hate speech is not tolerated. This includes racism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and religious intolerance such as anti-semitism. This list is illustrative but not exhaustive.

https://journa.host/about

[BootinUp]

25. So since November 20 anymore charges made against the server

you would like to ban?

[CousinIT]

16. LOVE IT! Thank you EarlG!

I'm on universodon (and Post) but no hurry - I'm happy with links for now.

Merry Christmas!

[Pluvious]

17. Awesome - this is a terrific enhancement to an already terrific site :)

[YoshidaYui]

20. I am not leaving Twitter unless

I am forced off - if so I can always go there.

[Rhiannon12866]

43. Same here.

I follow important dog rescue work there.

[BootinUp]

21. Thanks!

[live love laugh]

44. I couldn't access the servers listed so I'm on mstdn.plus.

Please add mstdn.plus.

I think they’re overwhelmed with server applicants so that some servers are periodically not available for signup.

[BootinUp]

46. One interesting thing about mastodon

is that messages are stored on the original server instance where a users account is. So say someone you follow is on mastodon.social or whatever. Maybe its the software creator of mastodon Eugen Rochko that you a re following and you want to embed a message of his in a post here. If the mastodon.social instance is allowed for embeds then you will be able to see it here. So your personal mastodon instance wouldn't be involved in that scenario. Cheers.

[blogslug]

47. How did I miss this?

Thank you Elad and EarlG! This is great!