Now, you can embed Mastodon posts in Medium stories
How we use Embedly to simplify sharing from social platforms
This year, Medium announced that we’re embracing the fediverse by creating our own instance on Mastodon. Mastodon is an ad-free, federated social network made up of an independently-owned servers (or “instances”). Medium members can join our Mastodon instance, me.dm, by creating an account linked directly to their Medium profile.
Easy embeds from 50,000+ Mastodon servers
We want writing on Medium to be a seamless, streamlined experience for all users — and so we’ve built a feature to make sharing Mastodon posts on Medium easy.
We’ve integrated federated embeds into the Medium editor with the help of Embedly, a powerful embed API that Medium acquired in 2016. (I’m a software engineer at Medium and the principal engineer behind Embedly.) Embedly converts URLs posted in Medium articles into fully-rendered rich HTML, making it possible for writers to embed Mastodon posts from over 50,000 federated Mastodon instances across the fediverse.
Whether you’re a Medium member posting from your @me.dm account or a user of another server, your Mastodon posts will unfurl as rich embedded content in your Medium stories — without having to copy over any custom HTML or code blocks.
To embed a Mastodon post into your Medium story, simply copy the Mastodon post URL and paste it into your draft. When you hit enter, Embedly will validate the Mastodon URL and generate the embedded content automatically.
Here’s an example of how it looks in action:
Our tool also converts Mastodon profiles into an embedded content card. For example, here’s how the Medium Mastodon account page embeds into Medium:
Overall, Medium’s embrace of Mastodon presents a fun new opportunity for writers to expand their reach and connect with a wider audience. If you’ve used the Mastodon embed feature already, show us by linking to your story in the comments! (And if you’re interested in trying out Mastodon, visit medium.com/mastodon.)
