Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper?

Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this. John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, are at the forefront of integrating social features with blogs, newsletters, essays — anything that doesn’t fit in a box of 500 characters or less.

In this episode of Dot Social, they talk with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about rediscovering the magic of the blogosphere; why formatting, identity, and interoperability are tricky problems to solve; and where writing belongs in the next chapter of the internet.

Highlights of this conversation:
1:24 Why should writers and bloggers care about this topic?
8:35 How the plugin has been received
12:15 Building social into blogs
17:35 Will this increase discovery?
20:15 Models for discovery
23:03 Tumblr in its heyday and status of integration
25:17 How they’re thinking about AT Proto
33:20 Thoughts on bridging
37:16 Core principles around integrating long-form content into protocol
44:06 Leveraging lessons from email?
46:16 Need for collaboration
49:10 Rough edges
52:50 New experiences

Mentioned or related to this episode:
- Julian Lam of Node BB nodebb.org/
- “Digital Sovereignty Is the New Influencer Status, with Citation Needed's Molly White” dot-social.simplecast.com/epis…
- “Steps Forward in Long-form Text” socialwebfoundation.org/2025/0…

🔎 You can find John at john.onolan.org/ and Matthias at pfefferle.dev/.
✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mike@flipboard.social and @mmccue.bsky.social.
🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. about.surf.social/

Evan Prodromou

2025-05-01 20:58:44

Steps Forward in Long-form Text

Some quick news about the Long-form Text project at the Social Web Foundation. After the publication of the draft FEP b2b8 (“Long-form Text”), the Social Web Foundation has been working with implementers to get more support for the Article data type, representing multi-paragraph text on the Fediverse.

One of the big pain points has been how subscribers to long-form text from platforms like WordPress, WriteFreely, Plume and Ghost.org see the text in their microblogging platforms like Mastodon or Threads. Often, the data is abbreviated or misformatted. FEP b2b8 is, in part, a way to improve and standardize this problem.

The work in this area is bearing fruit; a few weeks ago, Shubhankar Srivastava of the Fediverse team at Threads announced that Threads is now properly displaying long-form text from Ghost. This is a big step forward in support.

The participants in the project are aiming to have better standards support from both publishers and consumers over the next few months, so I’m optimistic that other platforms will see similar improvements.

Long-form text on the Fediverse

The Fediverse’s core strength is short, paragraph-length status updates, observations and comments. But more and more newsletter, blogging, and publishing platforms are implementing ActivityP…

^{Social Web Foundation}