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

[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.