Can I share an insight?
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@controlfreak @yonder @freebliss Mirlo, Bandcamp and Soundcloud links automatically embed a player in any Mastodon link that points to a song (not an album or artist page). Clicking that player will play the song without leaving Mastodon. Clicking the link itself still opens the song page. For example:
The Future Is Waiting, by sideSister
The Future Is Waiting by sideSister, released 31 October 2025 When I was a little girl, I told my parents what I would be. I was wrong of course, but they were kind and listened patiently. 'Cos who knows where this will go? Who knows where this will go? The future is waiting for me. The birds sit in the tree and watch their children spread their own wings. They fall and crash and fall and crash and fall and crash on repeat. For who knows where they will go? Who knows where they will go? The future is waiting for them. Not to sound clichéd, but every day really is a new one. You try and try and try and try and try as much as you can. ‘Cos who knows where this will go? I don’t know where it will go? The future is waiting for you.
sideSister (sidesister.bandcamp.com)
@elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Ah right, I get you now. I had no idea bandcamp links did that!
It worked in your post but I had to click it twice, it went blank & I had to wait a few seconds between clicks, then it worked. Maybe that's why I hadn't noticed these were embeds
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@elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Ah right, I get you now. I had no idea bandcamp links did that!
It worked in your post but I had to click it twice, it went blank & I had to wait a few seconds between clicks, then it worked. Maybe that's why I hadn't noticed these were embeds
@elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
I tried a soundcloud embed from another artist. That just went blank and didn't play anything or show any controls. I checked adblockers etc and donlt think it's blocked by them. I guess this is probably a YMMV thing.
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@controlfreak @elsemusic @freebliss
I'd like to know if this is something that could be added to faircamp, or needs to be added to fedi clients as a specific feature for sites
One way could be to allow embedding any external audio file hosted on an external site in a post, if it's recognised as an mp3 etc, it could then be embedded in an player without uploading to fedi server
That would then work for pretty much any site as long as there's a direct link to audio file on the external site
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@elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Ah right, I get you now. I had no idea bandcamp links did that!
It worked in your post but I had to click it twice, it went blank & I had to wait a few seconds between clicks, then it worked. Maybe that's why I hadn't noticed these were embeds
@yonder @controlfreak @freebliss It does that for me too.
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@controlfreak @elsemusic @freebliss
I'd like to know if this is something that could be added to faircamp, or needs to be added to fedi clients as a specific feature for sites
One way could be to allow embedding any external audio file hosted on an external site in a post, if it's recognised as an mp3 etc, it could then be embedded in an player without uploading to fedi server
That would then work for pretty much any site as long as there's a direct link to audio file on the external site
@yonder @controlfreak @freebliss Agreed. That would be a useful thing.
I think there are two options, and they're discussed in this post:
Understanding Mastodon Preview Card Display Logic
Ever wondered why some links you post to Mastodon show a nicely formatted preview card, but others don’t? It can seem random, even showing differently from app to app.
Jeff Sikes (box464.com)
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@controlfreak @yonder @freebliss Mirlo, Bandcamp and Soundcloud links automatically embed a player in any Mastodon link that points to a song (not an album or artist page). Clicking that player will play the song without leaving Mastodon. Clicking the link itself still opens the song page. For example:
The Future Is Waiting, by sideSister
The Future Is Waiting by sideSister, released 31 October 2025 When I was a little girl, I told my parents what I would be. I was wrong of course, but they were kind and listened patiently. 'Cos who knows where this will go? Who knows where this will go? The future is waiting for me. The birds sit in the tree and watch their children spread their own wings. They fall and crash and fall and crash and fall and crash on repeat. For who knows where they will go? Who knows where they will go? The future is waiting for them. Not to sound clichéd, but every day really is a new one. You try and try and try and try and try as much as you can. ‘Cos who knows where this will go? I don’t know where it will go? The future is waiting for you.
sideSister (sidesister.bandcamp.com)
@elsemusic
This is probably client dependent. My mobile client have only a link, not a player.
@controlfreak @yonder @freebliss -
@yonder @controlfreak @freebliss Agreed. That would be a useful thing.
I think there are two options, and they're discussed in this post:
Understanding Mastodon Preview Card Display Logic
Ever wondered why some links you post to Mastodon show a nicely formatted preview card, but others don’t? It can seem random, even showing differently from app to app.
Jeff Sikes (box464.com)
@elsemusic @yonder @controlfreak This is on my list for faircamp 2.x, among the "stretch goals", so it will depend on how everything else goes.
I am fairly confident that there will be a simple baseline implementation (making this configurable - opt-in or opt-out - and supporting at least the basic opengraph og:audio tag (not sure if/how many clients use that by itself already, although it would be a no-brainer to support that I guess?)), for a full-blown embed-backed implemetation I'm not yet sure if there will be enough time, but let's see!
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@yonder @controlfreak @freebliss Agreed. That would be a useful thing.
I think there are two options, and they're discussed in this post:
Understanding Mastodon Preview Card Display Logic
Ever wondered why some links you post to Mastodon show a nicely formatted preview card, but others don’t? It can seem random, even showing differently from app to app.
Jeff Sikes (box464.com)
@elsemusic that's some great research, thanks for sharing!
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@elsemusic @yonder @controlfreak This is on my list for faircamp 2.x, among the "stretch goals", so it will depend on how everything else goes.
I am fairly confident that there will be a simple baseline implementation (making this configurable - opt-in or opt-out - and supporting at least the basic opengraph og:audio tag (not sure if/how many clients use that by itself already, although it would be a no-brainer to support that I guess?)), for a full-blown embed-backed implemetation I'm not yet sure if there will be enough time, but let's see!@elsemusic @yonder @controlfreak and a personal note, to not completely lose track of ethics: on a societal/systems design level I'm really not a fan of this whole preview card architecture (open graph and all).
Facebook and Twitter (which are the origin of this, facebook literally authored the open graph spec) have managed to turn every website into a potential free supplier for bespoke social media platform metadata (which embellishes social media platforms and ties users to them, while suffocating visits to the sites that supply the content, not a great deal). Thereby they baked the concept of "platforms/silos that you hardly ever leave, where people addictively scroll an endless stream of partially embedded content from other sites" firmly into the fabric of the web. Mastodon and others 1:1 copied this, and although one can argue that this was a necessity to get people to accept/adopt mastodon and other alternatives (maybe, I guess we'll never know now), I still consider this a fundamentally problematic system.
I'm now trying to find some middle ground by implementing these standards (even if, to be honest, I'd rather not), while at least keeping them configurable (opt-in/out respectively) ... Anyhow, I salute everyone who builds "social networks" (e.g. on the fediverse) without these patterns ... ( ◡‿◡ *)
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@yonder @controlfreak @freebliss It does that for me too.
@elsemusic @yonder @controlfreak @freebliss
Having released videos on peertube recently, I was kind of shocked at how much more « engagement » I got on Masto. Is it the video format or also the fact that the videos are clickable in the feed?
Which got me thinking. You can upload audio-only files to peertube, and it doesn’t seem to add much or any file size overhead…
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@elsemusic @yonder @controlfreak @freebliss
Having released videos on peertube recently, I was kind of shocked at how much more « engagement » I got on Masto. Is it the video format or also the fact that the videos are clickable in the feed?
Which got me thinking. You can upload audio-only files to peertube, and it doesn’t seem to add much or any file size overhead…
@sknob don't want to have every single track from catalogue on peertube as audio which would then require more clicks after a click thru to get to downloads and support. want the posted track to be playable and if clicked you are at the right place to download and support.
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@sknob don't want to have every single track from catalogue on peertube as audio which would then require more clicks after a click thru to get to downloads and support. want the posted track to be playable and if clicked you are at the right place to download and support.
@controlfreak yup, just sayin’
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@controlfreak @freebliss I figure that using a lo-fi transcoding and having posts expire after two weeks avoid the worst consequences of embedding an MP3 in a post.
@elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss just a note here that long running small-mid sized masto instances have much bigger expense on database than media (media uploads). at least I'm observing this on sonomu.
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@elsemusic @yonder @controlfreak @freebliss
Having released videos on peertube recently, I was kind of shocked at how much more « engagement » I got on Masto. Is it the video format or also the fact that the videos are clickable in the feed?
Which got me thinking. You can upload audio-only files to peertube, and it doesn’t seem to add much or any file size overhead…
@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Playing with my faircamp, and I think I got these embeds working: here's a single song
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@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Playing with my faircamp, and I think I got these embeds working: here's a single song
@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
And it's possible to embed a whole album too:
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@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
And it's possible to embed a whole album too:
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Can I share an insight?
I've observed with Mastodon posts for sideSister that a post with an embedded music player gets more listens than a post that requires navigating to a separate website, and =way= more listens than a post that takes the reader to an aggregation page (we used those a few years back).
This doesn't mean we shouldn't use external links or aggregation pages, just that it works best for us to include an immediate point of gratification.
[more ...]
@elsemusic I wish I had time to perform the analysis that you have. I have no idea if my posts with embeds get good engagement. Honestly, I'd have to think about how to do that.
Here's what I know: I just shared 3 peace-oriented Bandcamp links (i.e., embeds in the native app) in the last 24 hours. No idea if it's related by I lost over 100 followers in the same period. Now, that could have been the embeds, the peace theme, or completely unrelated. -
We try to provide this immediate gratification in two ways.
[1] We include a link to the song on Mirlo or Bandcamp. This automatically embeds a player.
[2] We drop an MP3 onto the post. Usually one we've transcoded to lo-fi to minimise the bandwidth.
[more ...]
@elsemusic Again, I hit the time constraint. As someone working 3 jobs, needing yet another format (MP3, short aka not-the-whole-song) means time I don't usually have.
I almost always use an app (Metatext) which does not show the embeds, so I forget about them. I just checked another Fediverse app on my phone and it also fails to show the embed. They just show the link. So, you do well to add the MP3 for native plays! -
We can then include any other links we want in that post, whether they're to elasticStage, our own website, an aggregation page, video site, etc. But it means readers can hear the song without having to leave Mastodon.
Just my $0.02 worth. Ignore it if it's not helpful.
[... ends]
@elsemusic
I truly appreciate your insight and since you've done the analysis, I trust your wisdom more than my own tiny experience.
That being said, the native app takes several minutes to load while the 3rd party app is instantaneous, so it's unlikely that I'll start to use the native one. I will miss the embeds, but your MP3s will still be front forward. Well done.
I could tell that this was your experience both by what you share and by what you interact with from me. -
@elsemusic
I truly appreciate your insight and since you've done the analysis, I trust your wisdom more than my own tiny experience.
That being said, the native app takes several minutes to load while the 3rd party app is instantaneous, so it's unlikely that I'll start to use the native one. I will miss the embeds, but your MP3s will still be front forward. Well done.
I could tell that this was your experience both by what you share and by what you interact with from me.@elsemusic And please don't miss the part about how much I honor your attention to this detail. It's quite impressive. Makes me wish I had a staff so I could send a couple of them to check this out on my timelines.
P.S. BC embeds were recently added on BlueSky. The reaction to them is evenly divided, though those who detest them are quite militant about it.
