Elad has programmed a holiday gift for DU -- (limited) Mastodon embedding is now available [View all]

[EarlG]

This discussion thread was locked by EarlG (a host of the Announcements group).

As you know, tweets and YouTube videos can be automatically embedded on DU by simply entering the URL of the tweet or video into the body of your post. Elad has now added functionality so that Mastodon posts (toots) can be embedded in the same way.

In addition, links to Mastodon feeds and profiles can now be posted without the link breaking.

There are some caveats!

First, this is VERY experimental, so you may experience unexpected issues. If you see anything that looks like it's working incorrectly, please feel free to contact me via DU Mail.

Second, because Mastodon is a decentralized system, there is no single "top level" domain -- like "twitter.com" or "youtube.com" -- to point at. This creates some issues for us, but the bottom line is that we essentially have to have a list of "approved" Mastodon servers that our embedding will work for.

We've started with a short list of six of the most popular servers that many journalists are using. So as of now, embedding only works for the following servers:

mastodon.online
journa.host
mastodon.social
mstdn.social
mas.to
mastodon.world

Please note that if you link to any other server, it will show up as just a link, not an embed. If this all keeps working as intended, we will look at adding additional servers in the new year.

To embed a toot, simply copy the URL of the individual toot and paste it into the body of your DU post. (If you're looking at a Mastodon feed, you can go to the individual toot by clicking the text in the body of the toot.)

Then when you post, it should show up like this:

So again, if you spot any issues please let me know -- otherwise, hope you enjoy