URLs in federated messages coming from Friendica

Continuing the discussion from Discover Friendica:

@trashHeap, now we have a slow forum, we can discuss issues that are unlikely to be addressed unless we get lucky, and here may be one such incident: your URLs aren’t exploded in text representation.

Here is an example from a post you made today:

https://social.notlocked.in/display/fa94cab1-165c-55d4-dbaf-530015229286

On Mastodon webUI:

Screenshot_2019-02-02%20Mastodon%20SDF

The link is truncated, but is still a full URL. However, in tootstream:

Sorry, I know that is small, here it is, verbatim, as it is text only and the link is generated by the terminal:

  trashHeap @trashheap@social.notlocked.in 🔒 2019-02-02 17:35:23 (19 minutes ago)
  ♺:0 ♥:0 id:25 vis:🌎
  Hunh. I was JUST asking about #OSR #RPG zines and their going to try and crowdfund a bunch of them via kickstarter this month. Talk about timing.

  Delayed Blast Gamemaster #1 (Zine Quest) www.tenkarstavern.com/2019/02/…

Okay, so who do we ping about that? tootstream? Friendica? ActivityPub (for maybe providing guidance on this)? :slight_smile:

Thats probably an artifact of the fact that I was pushing to Friendica from a StatusNet/OStatus client on LineageOS and THEN it federating via ActivityPub.

My prior links haven’t truncated, correct? I log into my abandoned Anticapitalist.Party account to sanity check federation sometimes and hadn’t noticed it.

The StatusNet/OStatus client might be expecting some sort of URL shortener service that Friendica doesn’t have; ill have to dig into it’s settings maybe. Such things were pretty common on StatusNet back when I used it.

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I noticed it happening since your switch to Friendica, but no real data.

Oh OK. I missunderstood what was happening at first, but looking again at your tootstream screenshot and the Mastodon web interface I get it I think.

If I posted a couple different test links could you tell me how they appear in tootstream? (Assuming it federates, sometimes if I do things ActivityPub doesn’t like or support it won’t.)

Yeah, def. Try linking to this thread, they are long and get truncated. I’ll respond with findings this evening.

Also, I don’t think privacy matters, so they can be non-public. Or, science! :slight_smile:

I did one thats filtered to just you, with you tagged in it, with two types of links to this thread in there.

Don’t think you ever recieved it. Sometimes fancy friendica formatting prevents federation right now.

Can you confirm your tootstream version is greater than 0.3.4 ?

Thogh I did some poking around. Looks to be both the fault of Friendica and Tootstream. Ill try and confirm with the Friendica support. It looks like when friendica generates the html from the markdown of friendica posts, it includes the full URL as an ActivityPub attachment. Tootstream supports image and media attachments via URLs as of 0.3.4 and newer, but I can’t find it supporting URL attachments.

That being said the length of the URL at which triggers this sort of thing from Friendica should be configurable, and it doesn’t appear to be either. URL shortening does resolve it, but I dont have a URL shortening service I trust or like currently.

I might install tootstream and check with Friendica support on this when I get a chance. Have a busy plate tonight and tomorrow.

I’ve posted this to Friendica’s Support Forum to see where they think the bug is. Ill file bugs in github accordingly.

I did some testing with the demo version of URL shortener polr and that deffinitely solves the truncation problem as a work around. Ive been planning on standing up my own URL shortener for some time. Might stand something up at weburi.fun soon.

EDIT

Friendica support is very confident this is technically a tootstream issue. Im willing to hit tootstream up with a bug, but can you confirm @maiki your on the newest release of tootstream?

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Tootstream version: 0.3.6

You can ping me in the issue (@maiki on MS-GIT).

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I believe our journey with this issue is over. Did we learn anything, @trashHeap? :slight_smile:

Not sure, other than self-hosting ActivityPub is hard ; and the ActivityPub spec is subject to broad and non matching interpretation by clients.

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