Set up an actor for the Category or Tag you want to publish content to Mastodon.
Copy the “handle” of the Actor.
Look up the handle on Mastodon and follow it.
[note] markup
You can select part of your post to be published via ActivityPub by wrapping text in [note][/note]. This gives you more control over what appears on microblogging services like Mastodon. For example, if your post looks like this in the composer:
We have some exciting news to share: [note]Everything Pets is launching a magazine![/note]
For what is worth it, first I published the Discourse post with the notes. Then, during the 5 minutes before it is federated, I removed the note tags because they were ugly and I was confused. Then I thought maybe they “disappear” after the post is federated and I added them again.
After seeing that the full post had been federated, I removed the note syntax from the Discourse post.
Yes, sorry by “tags” I meant [note][/note]. I’m still a little unclear as to whether they were in the post at the time the post was federated. If you added them back in after federation they are not going to apply to content that is already federated.
Ok, yes, [note][/note] was in place when I posted the new topic on discourse and they were also in place after a few minutes when the topic was federated.
Maybe we can leave this here, and next time we federate a post I will be paying attention on every step, now that I know what tp expect and what might happen.
I’ve added actors for multiple tags and then created a post using those tags. I was expecting both actors to post to activity pub, but only one of them did.
I’m following both on my main mastodon.social account, but I only see one post in the logs. Is this supposed to work or is only one actor supported?
If you have multiple tags actors associated with a post only the first listed tag’s actor will publish the post currently. Adding support for publishing from multiple actors of the same taxonomic type at once is a good Feature request (tag it activitypub).
Is there a way to control which categories or tags don’t get published to Mastodon? I’d like to exclude certain internal discussion topics from being posted, but still allow announcements and blog posts.Thanks in advance!
Hey @Kayaart, thanks for the question. Only the tags and categories you’ve explicitly set up as ActivityPub actors will publish content to the fediverse. If you have categories and tags for internal discussion, just leave them be (i.e. don’t set up an actor).
Thanks a lot for the clarification that makes sense now!
So just to confirm: if I leave some categories/tags without setting up an ActivityPub actor, nothing from them will get pushed to Mastodon, right?
On the Federation tab of the user profile page, there is a configuration to add Linked Actors with an option for type Discourse or Mastodon. It says:
Posts associated with a linked actor will be attributed to your account.
How does this work? If I add a Mastodon account here, will my Mastodon posts end up on Discourse or is it the other way around? If the former, how are tags and categories selected? If I add a Discourse account here, posts from the external server will be added to the one on which this has been configured? Again, what if the categories and tags are not consistent?
I am hosting both Discourse and Mastodon, and I also have an account on this Discourse instance. I imagine the best configuration for me would be to have a post on either Discourse instance appear on both servers and be shared once on Mastodon. How this would be configured would depend on the answer to the previous question.
Also, what about replying to posts on ActivityPub? Can I use Mastodon to reply to a post from a linked actor for categories, tags, and users?
Neither! This feature allows you to associate posts with your account if those posts are federated via the normal process, e.g. via categories or tag actors. To give an example:
You have a category on your Discourse called “Announcements”, which you set up with full topic ActivityPub publishing.
You have a user account on your Discourse, eric_discourse.
You have a user account on your Mastodon, eric_mastodon.
You follow “Announcements” with eric_mastodon.
eric_discourse (i.e. you) creates a new topic in “Announcements”.
Announcements federates the topic.
You respond to that topic on Mastodon with eric_mastodon.
Your response is processed by your Discourse Announcements category, appearing as a reply (post) in the topic.
There is nothing to associate eric_mastodon with eric_discourse so the ActivityPub plugin creates a staged user for eric_mastodon’s reply post, eric_mastodon1 (the username is generated from the username of the Actor).
The topic now looks like this:
First post from eric_discourse.
Reply (second) post from eric_mastodon1.
The feature you’re referring to allows you to prove that you are eric_mastodon1, so that you don’t have multiple user accounts on your Discourse. Once you complete the authorization process in that tab:
eric_mastodon1’s posts will be eric_discourse’s posts.
eric_mastodon1 will no longer exist.
Future activity from eric_mastodon will be associated with eric_discourse on your Discourse instance.
I’d swear it went like this, but after so much discussion I’m starting to doubt.