Another week, another round of ActivityPub-related improvements! Over the last few months we’ve been filling in little details for Mastodon compatibility in Micro.blog. Were at the point where Micro.blog is a good fediverse citizen and has everything most people should need.
Today I rolled out initial support for setting a Mastodon profile header image. This is a feature that Micro.blog doesn’t currently have for its own profiles. Should it? I’m not sure, but in the meantime I didn’t want it to hold back anyone who likes profile headers on Mastodon.
You can upload a profile header in Micro.blog under Account → View Mastodon Details. When Mastodon users follow your account, they will see the header on Mastodon. Here’s a screenshot of part of the settings screen:
Micro.blog also does a better job of notifying followers on other servers when a profile photo updates. Mastodon generally has a different philosophy for storing images than Micro.blog does. Micro.blog loads most images as needed when they are viewed and caches them for a certain length of time, whereas Mastodon waits for a server to tell it that a profile or post has updated and then copies any images to its own server.
We could take most major features in Micro.blog and keep fine-tuning them indefinitely. Mastodon support is no exception, but I think this is a good time to pause. Next week I’m excited to revisit some pieces of the core Micro.blog platform that don’t necessary have anything to do with the fediverse.
