Reconsidering Longform

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Author: Brendan & Roel

Methods and Limitations

Posted on by Brendan & Roel

This post describes the setup of our research. As described in our first post, we took a two-step approach. First interviews with practitioners and then design prototyping. The research we conducted took place between June and September 2025.

Expert interviews

We reached out to 18 different outlets, writers or publishers with a Fediverse presence. We used a broad and inclusive definition of publisher, writer and professional. Meaning we intended to include personal blog and those that publish long-form but derive income otherwise. Ultimately we conducted hour-long semi-structured interviews with 5 people1.

We spoke to: an independent web editor working for an outlet publishing both online and in print with local reach; a web editor for an online outlet with global scope and reach; a web editor and writer for an online outlet with national reach, an independent online writer; a member of the editorial board of an outlet publishing both online and in print with national reach. We spoke to three men, one woman and one non-binary person and all were based in North America or Europe.

In addition, we were participant observers in three meetings with public media professionals currently using the Fediverse in various capacities. Their organizations produce, primarily, video and audio media for German-speaking audiences in Europe with a mandate to inform and educate. While these publishers are still engaged to various degrees with centralized commercial platforms, they are actively investing in digital social systems which support more editorial independence, audience context and localized control.

Simultaneously we studied different existing long-form Fediverse platforms by using them and analyzing them. Doing so we got better insight in to their affordances, as well as getting an understanding how they interoperate. In connection to this we have spoken to different developers to get a better sense of what they are working on and what the broader conversations around long-form features are. Finally we have sketched and prototyped interfaces for displaying long-form content based on these different conversations.

Limitations

One limitation is we did not speak to many people. However, this was not prohibitive as the purpose of this study was to surface issues that are part of the larger topic which warrant further investigation. Therefore we framed our work in terms of emerging themes, as these are helpful threads to unravel in future work rather than definitive findings.

While we spoke only to a limited number of people, we did speak to them in-depth and got more insights into the way experienced practitioners understand that part of their professional context. That is to say, you should not read this study as “all publishing professionals on the Fediverse think this way”. Our methods do not warrant such conclusions. Instead consider it as “these professionals had this opinion” which can offer insights, even if it is a minority opinion. Such insights help asking better questions around a particular set of features and the people that will work with them. In other words, they are the starting point for design inquiries and prototyping.

Timing was another limitation of the project. In general, we analyzed software in a particular moment in time and features change or are added over time. In one way we were “on time” as there is much happening in this space. On the other hand, we conducted some of the work right as Ghost enabled ActivityPub for their platform. As we explore in Who Wants To Federate A Full Article, we encountered skepticism toward the idea of federating full long-form pieces. The exceptions were those who already wrote “newsletter style”. So a broader adoption of federating Newsletter/Blog software might find more authors sympathetic to federating full articles. Having said that, our observations in that piece remain relevant for further design work on of federated long-form publishing more generally.

  1. These interviews took place in July and August 2025. The summer months limited our ability to speak to more people. This was a consequence of the short timeline of the project. ↩︎

Emerging Themes: Tooling Ecosystems

Posted on by Brendan & Roel

Our respondents make extensive use of third-party tools to engage with the fediverse. In other words, they post not only via a Mastodon or WordPress instance or their respective clients, but with anything ranging from auto-posting bots to content scheduling platforms. This post covers some of those tools and what that might mean going forward.

Generally we found that once publishers set up a fediverse presence, whether in the form of an account or a dedicated instance, their further engagement is quite light-handed. Most indicate they spend little time engaging with social media and use it primarily as a distribution platform to redirect (potential) readers to their own sites, rather than as a way to elicit commentary or feedback. Furthermore, all publishers bar one we spoke to use the fediverse as part of a broader array of social media. This, then, translates into their extensive use of automated or semi-automated tools.

Content scheduling platforms

Our respondents specifically mentioned no/low-code automation platforms such as IFTT1 but also social media content scheduling and cross-posting platforms such as Buffer and Publr. These are used to schedule and cross-post notices of new articles simultaneously to different social media platforms. Using such tools, publishers get aggregated and platform-specific insights into how many reactions, shares, and favorites posts get. These platforms sit between the publisher and the fediverse app.

Diagram showing a posting flow. From a scheduler containing partial content to a fediverse account to a follower to a link tracker to the website with the full content.

Some respondents indicated also making use of link trackers such as Dub and Kutt, either as a service or as part of the publisher’s own infrastructure. These link trackers sit between the visitor and the final website. These are used to track who clicks on links and on what social platform those links are clicked on. Although many fediverse clients do not show full URLs, such link trackers can be recognized by the addition of UTM parameters to the URL, such as:

?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon

Such link-trackers are often used in combination with post-scheduling tools to gauge the effectiveness of disseminating articles across different social media.

Bespoke automations

Some publishers indicated making use of bespoke (semi-automated) means of promoting articles. For instance, we learned of an example of a publisher using custom scripts to mirror different RSS feeds of the publication. We also learned of the use of a custom script used to (re)post the most popular article of the week.

A fediverse-specific practice we encountered is what one might call “boost-cycling”. That entails first publishing a post and then boosting it with the same account after a few hours. Then in later hours or days, the post is unboosted and boosted again to reach those in different time zones. Authors with multiple ActivityPub accounts, for instance a personal account and a blog, would also boost-cycle with their different accounts to increase reach and make sure the article “fans out” well enough. This has to do with federation dynamics and reverse chronological timelines.

Take-aways for developers and designers

1 – Publishers don’t post the way you think they do

When it comes to long-form publishing, publishers are not using the clients you design. Instead, they use specialist tools that connect directly to fediverse instances over the API. 

In one case we spoke to a web editor who was not sure which fediverse software or instance their publication was on. This is of course not a shortcoming of that editor but rather an indication that these professionals work with different tooling ecosystems. They are not “on the fediverse” but rather “on the content scheduling platform”. Yet, these professionals are the way through which long-form publications and journalistic outlets make their way to the fediverse.

To cater to long-form publishers, developers would probably do well to focus on integrations with third party tooling over for instance adding custom long-form editing and writing environments in their software. However, that would also need additional research that looks in more detail in to those workflows. How are those tools used exactly? What affordances do these tools have that are lacking support in fediverse apps?

2 – A long-form publishing context is different from personal social media

Publishing is a process involving several steps and different people. Authoring and editing articles happens in writing environments like Google Docs. Material is then either copied into the CMS or handed over to the web editors. Disseminating articles over social media is done (semi)automatically or is handled by someone else entirely from the social media team. These are crucial differences between individual or personal use of social media and their use in long-from publishing environments. It is therefore wrong to assume that the author and the poster are one and the same. It is also wrong to assume materials are authored in the environment where they are posted. Finally as scheduling platforms show, the assumption that the article is “posted” in the environment where it eventually ends up also should be revised for long-form content.

While these findings hint at where to look next, turning these insights in to design strategies or product roadmaps would require additional research.

  1. A particular issue mentioned with IFTT is that while it supports Mastodon, it in fact only supports the instance mastodon.social. ↩︎

Emerging Themes: Who wants to federate a full article?

Posted on by Brendan & Roel

Based on our conversations with media professionals we identify a key issue: publishers likely won’t want to federate full articles, instead they want to redirect traffic back to their sites. This is the case both for publishers that make use of paywalls and those that don’t. It is also the case for publishers whose content is freely distributed under creative commons licenses and those that retain full copyright.

An important context here is that all publishers we spoke to found it important to have a presence on non-commercial social media. It spoke to and reinforced their values. It offered them independence. They saw it as a way to have access to their subscribers in a way which is not contingent on third parties. They did not need to be convinced why something like the fediverse was a good idea. Instead, when it comes to the fediverse as a distribution channel, they have particular needs.

Why do publishers want readers on their own site?


Formatting and layout
Publishers spend a great deal of effort to make sure their articles look good and read well. They make frequent use of illustrations, pull quotes, sub-headings and other formatting to break up the flow of text.

Those publishers whose online outlet mirrors material also published in print expressed a desire to maintain the same quality of design. Therefore, they invested heavily in custom(ized) CMS’ that can for instance flow text around images, or display multiple images as carousels or slideshows. In some cases such CMS support interactive elements such as information visualizations where readers can explore the data. Furthermore, published articles appear as part of series or with links to other articles in the archive and these can be indicated visually.

Publishers also feature image-only publications such as comics or photo reports. Especially where those include series of images, editorial control over placement is also important. Finally when it comes to photo reports, captions are an important element.

Funding
All publishers require income to operate. Although we spoke to publishers with very distinct business models, all saw their own website, and directing traffic to it, as a fundamental reason to use social media. The most obvious cases are those where the business model revolves around subscriptions, paywalls and advertising. However, publishers who offer their materials for free and who benefit from wide circulation of their material also expressed doubts. For instance, many rely on calls to become a member or to donate in the context around a piece of content. Only federating that content means it gets detached from such a fundraising context.

Control
Redirecting readers to their own platform ultimately is a way to redirect readers to a place the publisher can influence. That has different aspects. In terms of content moderation publishers wanted to for instance control comments on posts. Either to disable them altogether or to remove harassment. They can do so on their own sites, but will they be able to on federated long-form articles? Corollary to that is that some publishers mentioned the desire to know or influence the context in which the full article is displayed.

Another aspect is that it is on the publisher’s own sites that they can get fine-grained insights in to which articles are read, where they are circulating and where readers come from. Such insights are based on analytics suites on the site, or in front of the site. Metrics, such as impressions, are available on commercial social media but not on the fediverse.

What about Starlight Princess?

Starlight Princess adalah slot video bertema fantasi anime yang dikembangkan oleh Pragmatic Play, provider ternama di industri iGaming. Sejak diluncurkan, game ini cepat menjadi favorit para pemain berkat tampilan visualnya yang memukau, gameplay yang menghibur, dan potensi kemenangan besar hingga 15.000x taruhan. Games ini dapat anda temukan di Situs Slot Resmi Taurus77 yang telah dipercaya dan bersertifikat resmi PAGCOR.1

The above quote is pulled from a WriteAs instance. It is either SEO spam, advertisement for online casinos, or both. Long-form spam can be trivially found on many WriteAs and Plume instances, as on WordPress sites. Such content also gives you an idea who would actually like to federate full articles: Starlight Princess would.

How to deal simultaneously with both Starlight Princess and the fact that most publishers want to refer traffic back to their own site? This is a fundamental question for designers and developers of long-form support in fediverse apps is a key determinant of the utility of such a feature. The current design of many fediverse servers means that remote content is cached, viewable and searchable on different instances. It is a spammer’s paradise. At the same time, without thoughtful design of long-form support, the fediverse risks satisfying none of publishers’ needs to funnel traffic back to their own sites: formatting, support of revenue models and control over content and context.

How could long-form federation meet publishers’ needs?

However, at the same time the people we spoke to did indicate there would be interest in federating full articles under some conditions. We list some of the different things we’ve heard in this direction:

Those outlets who already adapted their content to web publishing2 saw possibility for federating full articles. That means that it is likely more suited for (certain forms) blogging and newsletters, as it addresses concerns around formatting and layout.

Distributing articles to paying subscribers would be an option several respondents expressed interest in3. Ultimately the main goal of the metrics that publishers employed is to know how well their reach is. Metrics are also one of the big reasons publishers want readers on their own site. These metrics are used as educated guesses how clicks can convert in to revenue. Tying federation to revenue thus eases those funding concerns.

Aggregate metrics could make it easier to know and prove to colleagues and decision-makers that investing in this ecosystem is the right decision.

Reply controls and moderation capabilities on federated long-form content respond to publishers need for influencing or controlling the context their materials are published in or circulated in.


  1. “Starlight Princess is an anime fantasy-themed video slot developed by Pragmatic Play, a leading provider in the iGaming industry. Since its launch, the game has quickly become a player favorite thanks to its stunning visuals, entertaining gameplay, and massive win potential of up to 15,000x the stake. You can find this game on the trusted and PAGCOR-certified official Taurus77 slot site”. Machine translated from Indonesian. Original at @taurus77 @retrogarde.de ↩︎
  2. As one interviewee described it: “You know, a cover photo and 600 or 700 words […] the standard written article on the web as it has been forever”. ↩︎
  3. Here the paid-subscriber RSS feed by 404 media is relevant prior art. It would however entail that people will not end up following publication@outlet.tld but rather subscriberUUID@outlet.tld and currently none of the systems work in this way. ↩︎

Reconsidering Long-form content and the Fediverse.

Posted on by Brendan & Roel

As the title suggests, we are interested in getting a better understanding of the possibilities for long-form publishing on the Fediverse. We think there is a lot of potential here, but we also think long-form content has not seen enough consideration as such.

What is long-form content?

We’ll say it upfront: long-form content is a bit of a vague, generic term that we’re using to describe a variety of things. We’re keeping it open on purpose, for now. Our working understanding, at this point, is that long-form content can be many different things: blog posts, illustrated articles as might appear in magazines, newspapers or purely-online news sites, “long-reads”, essays, rants, newsletters, or academic publications.

Long-form content often combines text and other media. Long-form content is longer than a tweet/toot, but shorter than a book.

In more technical, Fediverse-related terms, long-form content is what might be represented as an Article in the ActivityStreams Vocabulary.

What are we interested in?

We stared this inquiry with this question: Why should we follow the social media account of a public news organization which posts links to articles on the public news organization’s website when we could follow the public news organization’s website directly and read their articles in Mastodon?

This query opens out to other questions: is it just because mainstream social media do not allow for such functionality, or are there other reasons behind this? Does a publisher, like a public news organization, actually benefit from such a model or is it more important to link back to their own site? Actually, how do publishers understand and measure reach and impact of their long-form content more generally? But also, how do long-form publishers actually publish?

We’ve used a public news organization here as a stand-in. But in order to understand what the role of long-form content in the Fediverse ecology could be, we are interested in the perspective of writers and publishers more generally. “Publishers and writers” here should be understood in the broadest sense, that is, people who might have an interest in using the Fediverse to disseminate and announce their written works.

Another way of putting it, is that this project is about getting a more fine-grained understanding of what it is that separates a Note from an Article. We intuit that the difference between the two is about more than a difference in length and the inclusion of markup and media. It is about the different contexts of culture, economy and use that both forms of media inhabit and about the tensions that might exist between those two forms.

For instance, an article can be authored by several people. At the same time, current designs in alternative social media tend to assume a “one entry one author”. This runs contrary to existing practices where, aside from authors, editors and others contribute also contribute to the production of long-form content. Another tension is the one around revenue models and benefits that we already hinted at. Would publishers actually benefit from such a system? A further issue is that the Fediverse has built-in assumptions that all data is public. But some publishers rely on funding models models such as paywalls or subscriber-only content.

From the context of such (supposed) tensions, we have several other questions: What forms of displaying, disseminating and discovering long-form content make sense? What does long-form content typically look like and what challenges and opportunities does that represent? What functionalities do long-form publishers need and look for when publishing their material? 

Having a more fine-grained understanding of the contexts under which long-form content is produced, evaluated and disseminated allows us and others to design for those contexts better. Ultimately, we hope that benefits independent media outlets and the Fediverse more generally.

How will we find out?

Or, what is our research design? We plan for three steps: 

First, we want to understand the practices of professionals such as journalists or social media teams currently active on the Fediverse with regards to long-form publishing. What do these professionals use social media for? In particular we want to learn about how their use of social media relates to their publishing workflows: how are articles drafted and published, how are they revised, who publishes these articles and as who/what? What are measures for “success” and how are or can these be represented in the Fediverse? What do publishing strategies for publishing Fediverse-first, but not Fediverse exclusive, currently look like? What gaps are there between what the status quo of the Fediverse ecology offers and what practitioners want and need?

We will conduct semi-structured interviews with relevant practitioners to gain insights on these questions. Is that you? We would love to talk!

Simultaneously, we want to better understand the current state of the art of long-form publishing on the Fediverse. At the start of this post we said that long-form content has not seen enough consideration as such. That was not completely fair, and more of a way to get you reading up to this point ; ) In fact, there is plenty of stuff happening in this space that we are excited about and want to learn more from. Whether that is existing, albeit rudimentary, support for multiple media types in Mastodon forks or plugins that turn existing long-form platforms in to parts of the fediverse ecology, a lot is happening that we want to learn more about.

In other words, we want to find out what applications are already under development and in use, and, how their functionality works. We will learn more about that by trying out and studying those applications, for instance by dogfooding this blog. And, where possible, we hope to speak to developers and protocol designers to get a sense where the state of the art is and what the development community is thinking about. Again, is that you? We would love to talk!

Second, we will make small prototypes that either explore new possibilities, ask new questions or solve specific issues. These will be informed by the findings in the first step so we intentionally remain vague at this point. However, we will guide our prototyping by existing work and initiatives in this space as we aim for our efforts to be pragmatic and contributing to those already working on this topic. Having said that, and, us being us, we probably also want to try one or two out of left field things.

Third, we will be to revise the most promising of those prototypes of the second step based on input from the interlocutors of the first step. We will then consider a relevant form of publishing those prototypes. That could be a design mock-up, a contribution to emerging standards and specifications, a report or a series of blog entries. We’ll cross that bridge when we know more about where this research takes us.

So, who are we?

Brendan Howell (he/him) is an artist and a reluctant engineer currently doing research as a “Reinvent Social Platforms” Fellow at the Media-Lab Bayern / SWR X Lab. He is very into tools, plants, cargo bikes and discourse systems. He lives in Berlin, Germany but can often be found walking in wooded areas of Northern Europe or enjoying pastoral life in Hacksneck, Virginia, USA or Kvam, Norway with his extended family. You can find him on post.lurk.org.

Roel Roscam Abbing (he/him) is a practice-based researcher in arts and design. He is interested in sociotechnical systems, DIY, self-organization and alternative technological trajectories. Currently he is a doctoral student in Interaction Design at Malmö University where he is researching the configuration of on-line federation in alternative social media. You can find him on post.lurk.org.

Both Brendan and Roel have been involved in the Fediverse for quite a while and are co-hosting an instance as part of lurk.org.

Support

This research was supported, in part, by the Reinvent Social Platforms Fellowship of SWR X Lab and Media Lab Bayern

What is next?

We will keep this blog to post updates as we develop and refine our research project over time. As they say, like and subscribe, if you want to follow along!