I’m shutting down the post -> WP Plugin shares to Mastodon as @blog -> replies to that post operate as comments workflow. I wrote about this a while back. The short version: I want my WordPress posts to automatically share to Mastodon, and I want replies on Mastodon to show up as comments on my blog. I had recently posted on my site that I’d be trying out this integration as a way to incorporate comments and likes/reposts as well. Today I’m here to tell you, it’s not ready for prime time so I’ll be shutting this down for now and moving back to posting links to all posts from assortednerdery@mastodon.social instead.

The first part worked well. Posts go out automatically under @blog@danielandrews.com. The rest? Kind of a shit show.

A couple things I’d love to see improve:

• I wish you could link it up with you personal account. It posts from its own Mastodon account, not my personal one. Minor, but it bothers me. I’d love a way to interweave auto-posting.
• It was, broadly speaking, pretty unreliable. Posts would publish and then disappear after some time. No idea why. If it annoyed me, I’m sure it annoyed anyone following along.
• The default template is super opinionated, so you basically have to build an override to nuke the entire thing or it won’t bring along custom fields or anything else.
• No spam control. When I did a batch import of old posts recently, the account blasted out a wave of “edited” notifications to anyone following it. I took every precaution I knew of to suppress the RSS feed updates. Didn’t matter. Sorry to anyone who follows @blog@danielandrews.com and watched their timeline get buried.

The thing I keep coming back to, though, is something the tooling doesn’t really support yet: I want my short Mastodon posts to interweave with my longer writing on the site, as their own post type. A kind of unified stream.

I think I might just be describing micro.blog.