Can I share an insight?
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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. -
@yonder @naga I realise that if you click a Soundcloud link, it pops up a dialog asking that you log in. But dismissing that dialog (clicking anywhere else on the page works) lets you listen without having an account.
... and an embedded Soundcloud link (ie, a link to a song page) opens within Mastodon without requesting any log in.
@elsemusic @yonder @naga In the interface I typically use, the Soundcloud overlay requires that I find the X to close it. Great tip though. I didn't realize the X was there until you said we could click through.
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@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.@muz4now @elsemusic they've got embed for music on bluesky? I always have to post a soundcloud link to get an embedded player
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@muz4now @elsemusic they've got embed for music on bluesky? I always have to post a soundcloud link to get an embedded player
@floby @elsemusic Just as Mastodon, it must be a single track. An album doesn't work. It's also a very recent add ... maybe in the last week or two.
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@floby @elsemusic Just as Mastodon, it must be a single track. An album doesn't work. It's also a very recent add ... maybe in the last week or two.
@floby You didn't ask for it, but here's an example. Ignore if you don't want to see it. https://bsky.app/profile/muz4now.com/post/3mfy5gz43bh2n
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@floby You didn't ask for it, but here's an example. Ignore if you don't want to see it. https://bsky.app/profile/muz4now.com/post/3mfy5gz43bh2n
@muz4now thanks for the example! I gave it a listen.
So indeed this used to already work with soundcloud, but I see that they support more platforms somehow now, that's good -
@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Here are some notes if anyone wants to try it. I don't want to edit my faircamp pages, so instead I made a short HTML file that renders the player card.
In a mastodon post, I link directly to the new HTML file. It redirects to the song page if anyone clicks through to it.
Most of the html is copied from the existing faircamp page. It's quite short.
That way, you can host this file anywhere on your site.
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@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Here are some notes if anyone wants to try it. I don't want to edit my faircamp pages, so instead I made a short HTML file that renders the player card.
In a mastodon post, I link directly to the new HTML file. It redirects to the song page if anyone clicks through to it.
Most of the html is copied from the existing faircamp page. It's quite short.
That way, you can host this file anywhere on your site.
@sknob @elsemusic @controlfreak @freebliss
Essentially, only 2 HTML tags are required. They are, regrettably, "twitter:" tags.
This seems to be what allows bandcamp & soundcloud links have player embeds in mastodon.
Note that it only works if you have embeds enabled on your faircamp site.
(Note also, that a lot of fedi clients and apps don't render these player cards anyway, even if you decide to do this)
