There have been some requests to make it possible for Mastodon users to create threads on Lemmy. At the moment this is not possible because Mastodon cant set the title field which is mandatory in Lemmy. The same problem affects other projects like Pleroma or Friendica (where title is optional).

It is unlikely that Mastodon would make any change in this regard, so a workaround in Lemmy would be necessary. I implemented such a workaround which makes the title optional when receiving a federated post, and uses the first line of the content instead. This workaround could also be made configurable per instance or per community.

But to be honest I am not sure the workaround is a good idea in general, as it could result in bad titles, and generally more low-quality posts. Thats why I want to know what the community thinks about it.

  • 0x1C3B00DA@lemmy.ml
    7·
    2 years ago

    You don’t even need a special format. If you remove the pipe in your first example, that’s a normal microblog post. It would look perfectly normal and readable for other microblog users and lemmy could parse it into a representation that fits its UI easily (The @acct will be the community its posted to and the first line, up to a newline, punctuation character, or max character limit, will be the title.)

    Examples

    @[email protected] Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?

    Yes they should. I don’t see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

    would parse to something like

    {
  "to": "lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy",
  "title": "Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy?",
  "content": "Yes they should. I don't see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet."
}

    @[email protected] Should Mastodon users be able to create threads on Lemmy? Yes they should. I don’t see any reason why not. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

    would parse to the same thing because it could use the ? as delimiter.