Publishing posts to Mastodon

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey @ericomeehan,

@ericomeehan

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?

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:

1. You have a category on your Discourse called “Announcements”, which you set up with full topic ActivityPub publishing.
2. You have a user account on your Discourse, eric_discourse.
3. You have a user account on your Mastodon, eric_mastodon.
4. You follow “Announcements” with eric_mastodon.
5. eric_discourse (i.e. you) creates a new topic in “Announcements”.
6. Announcements federates the topic.
7. You respond to that topic on Mastodon with eric_mastodon.
8. Your response is processed by your Discourse Announcements category, appearing as a reply (post) in the topic.
9. 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).
10. 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.