I like the concept of using embeds of external content on your own site. This way you can show what you’re interested in or what your message is, like you would when retweeting, but your audience is not tied to one provider like Twitter or Instagram.

However, importing these posts like many people do is something I want to avoid: the posts should remain owned by their authors, they should be able to delete the post, and likes, views, etc should count towards their posts. Embedding provides the solution to this. The content is loaded from the external site (e.g. Twitter) and if an author has deleted the post, the embedded block will remain empty.

When a user on a federated service posts a message, the expectation is that it will be shared with other servers. Just like when you email someone, you understand that the message leaves your computer and possibly goes to another provider. However, if you tweet or post on Instagram, you would be rightfully annoyed to find your post copied onto someone else’s website, even after you have maybe deleted your post.

I also wanted to find out whether posts with such embeds showed up correctly when published to a federated network using the ActivityPub protocol. It doesn’t yet do so… Whether it’s a tweet with a video or text only, or an Instagram post, they show up mangled in the fediverse.

What would be ideal is the published, federated post containing nothing more of the embedded object than the link. Receiving servers could then display the embedded object themselves, if they so choose. A bit like how Friendica shows imported tweets.