I mentioned in my last post about how sticking an entire blogpost into a Mastodon status was less than ideal. Fortunately after having a look in the ActivityPub plugin settings I think there’s a solution.
WordPress allows different posts to have different post formats, and the plugin has a setting to match these formats to equivalent object types on ActivityPub. This means that I can write long posts and Mastodon etc. will interpret them as Articles and display the post as a link rather than the full text. On the other hand, if I want the full text to be shown, I can set the post as a Status and the whole thing will be available.
The other good thing about this is that when I use a Mastodon app to update the blog (thanks to the Use Mastodon Apps plugin), the post is already set as a status, meaning I can write short posts using Ivory, while writing longer posts through the various other means of updating WordPress.
I think this is the way to go with ActivityPub in general – providing as much information about the type of post and leaving it to the service to interpret rather than forcing something into a shape that doesn’t fit. Mastodon and other micro blogs probably don’t need to show full text, but the option is available to other web services to show if they so choose.