A Pelican plugin to publish content on the Fediverse
Fediverse will search your contents for articles (actually ALL contents except pages) that are not in a draft status.
On its first run it creates a file called posted_on_Mastodon.txt in your Pelican root directory populated with all your article URLs.
Then it tries to post all eligible articles to Mastodon and - if post routine returns no errors - writes posted article URLs in posted_on_Mastodon.txt.
On every further run it matches the actual articles list with the list in posted_on_Mastodon.txt file and posts only new articles (and writes them in posted_on_Mastodon.txt).
Fediverse is at its very first stage of development, but it is already usable in product environments.
This release can publish:
- Title of article
- Body of article
- hashtag(s) if any
Title is taken from article.title
Body is taken from article.summary with standard Pelican configuartion i.e. length trimmed to 50 words and summary ends with ... OR with parameters you set in pelicanconf.py (SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH and SUMMARY_END_SUFFIX).
If the total length of the post exceeds MAX length allowed from Mastodon, then Fediverse will trim article.summary accordingly.
Hashtag(s) are taken - if any - from article.tags and concatenated separating each of them with commas.
Pelican can nicely handle tags with whitespaces (for example #My nice article) but in Mastodon they must be written without. For this reason all whitespaces from Pelican hashtags will be removed before publishing (#Mynicearticle).
You can use the ftags metadata to add specific tags to a Fediverse post without including Pelican hashtags.
Title: This is a ftags sample usage
Date: 2025-05-23
Slug: ftags-sample
tags: tag_on_blog_and_fediverse, another_one
ftags: TagOnlyOnFediverse, SecondOne
This plugin depends on Mastodon.py.
In order to publish on Mastodon you need to enter in .env file, on the site root directory, the following information:
MASTODON_BASE_URL="URL of your Mastodon instance. For example https://mastodon.social"
MASTODON_OAUTH_TOKEN="Token of your Mastodon registered App"❗ Starting from Mastodon 4.4.0 posting using Username/Password has been deprecated. Now you have to use the OAuth Token method instead. Your OAuth Token is available in the admin page of your web Mastodon page.
There is no need to register an app in your Mastodon profile because Fediverse will do it for you!
On every run Fediverse looks for a file called pelicanfediverse_clientcred.secret and - if it is not found - it gets in touch with Mastodon, creates an app called PelicanFediverse and writes API keys and other necessary information in this file.
If you cancel this file Fediverse will create another app on its next run (this could be done in case of problem despite the fact Mastodon advise this is NOT a good behaviour since app should be created only once).
In pelicanconf.py some new parameters can be defined
-
MASTODON_VISIBILITY : Set post's visiblity on mastodon. Can be 'direct', 'private', 'unlisted' or 'public'. Default value = 'direct'
More details : https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/05_statuses.html#writing -
MASTODON_READ_MORE : Text to add at the end of the post, before link to the pelican's article. Default value = 'Read more: '
-
FEDIVERSE_TAGS : To add same tag on all fediverse post but not on blog post. It is possible to set multiple tags with comma separator. (ie "MyFirstTag, AnotherOne" generate #MyFirstTag and #AnotherOne)
MASTODON_VISIBILITY = 'direct'
MASTODON_READ_MORE = 'Read more: '
FEDIVERSE_TAGS = 'FromMyBlog'