thanks a lot for the thorough reply to my post, really appreciate you taking the time to address the points and even create those GitHub issues. Super helpful! I’ve put my thoughts on your comments below – yours are quoted, mine are in bold. (If markdown is going to work LOL I just enabled it)

You can also define the featured image in the post sidebar ; that will work too. We opted to highlight the WordPress Featured Image in notes so you can get publishing faster. You don’t need to insert an image and then go to the sidebar and pick a featured image ; you can do both in one step.

JS: Yeah, maybe the confusion’s on my end, but I think it comes down to my ‘ontology’ of what a WordPress post is. For me, there’s the ‘inside’ (the content blocks you want published on the page) and the ‘outside’ (metadata like the theme template, featured image setting in the sidebar, etc.). With Social Notes, I expect the content I put inside the note on my site (like an image block) to also be what gets posted out to Bluesky/Mastodon. That’s why using the Featured Image block inside the post feels weird – it shows up on my site, but it doesn’t seem to get embedded in the actual social post itself, whereas the ‘attached media’ does go to social but doesn’t appear in the note on my site.

That seems like a bug, this definitely should not be happening. I wonder if this may be a specificity of your theme. Is your theme publicly available maybe, so I could try it out on a test site?
I’m thinking this may also explain the issues you were having with the notes template in your theme.

JS: Sure thing, I’m using Bjork theme Björk WordPress Theme – Anders Norén

That’s definitely something we could improve. I took note of it in this issue.

JS: Great thanks!

I took note of that idea in this issue.

JS: This would be a great UX improvement thanks!

The short URL ended up being a wp.me link

It’s true it could be clearer. I took note of that here.

JS: Cheers!

So in the RSS feed it shows my username

This is an odd one. It should use the details of the user you’re logged in with when you publish the note. Does it not? What are the details of your logged in user in Users > Profile?

JS: I’ve looked into this a little bit more, and this seems to be showing my wp.com user profile name, rather than the nickname set in my blogs users > profile (for the user I was using to post social notes). Not totally sure how those are meant to interact, and couldn’t find much documentation on it. It’s not a massive deal for me, though. Probably user error at my end

I Should Be Able to Rename the SN URL?

I took note of that idea here.

JS: Cheers! Yeah, just having /sn/ feels a bit meaningless and maybe not great for SEO/semantics (though I’m not hugely bothered). Being able to set a proper name like /microblog/ would be much better

This is quite the laundry list of things I think are weird about Jetpack’s Social Notes feature as they are in March 2025.

Keep the feedback coming! 🙂

JS: My pleasure! I really do think this feature has a lot of potential. On that note, it’d be awesome if Social Notes got its own section in the Jetpack mobile app so I could post stuff on the go.

I work on the Jetpack team, and wanted to thank you for all that feedback! I’ve taken note of the different things you highlight in your post, so we can improve on the overall experience when we next iterate on Social notes.

When you add a featured image to a social note, you do it inside the post body in a featured image block. This was unexpected?

In most cases in WordPress, featured images are set in the sidebar but in this case, it gets inserted directly into the body of the note?

You can also define the featured image in the post sidebar ; that will work too. We opted to highlight the WordPress Featured Image in notes so you can get publishing faster. You don’t need to insert an image and then go to the sidebar and pick a featured image ; you can do both in one step.

if you want to post an image that shows up on the social sites, you have to add the image as “attached media” in the sidebar????

That works fine for syndication. But if someone clicks through to the social post on my blog, the image isn’t there – as it’s not embedded as block.

That seems like a bug, this definitely should not be happening. I wonder if this may be a specificity of your theme. Is your theme publicly available maybe, so I could try it out on a test site?

I’m thinking this may also explain the issues you were having with the notes template in your theme.

when Social Notes appear elsewhere in the Jetpack / WordPress UI (like Stats), all the social notes are assigned titles format like #NuMb3rs (untitled).

That’s definitely something we could improve. I took note of it in this issue.

I sort of think the ability to give it a default post title appearance should be in the settings.

I took note of that idea in this issue.

The short URL ended up being a wp.me link, which I wasn’t expecting
[…]
Everything went through wp.me, and that wasn’t clearly indicated in the settings

It’s true it could be clearer. I took note of that here.

in the RSS feed it shows my username – rather than my nickname.
I’d prefer it to show my name/nick name on the blog, not the login username.

This is an odd one. It should use the details of the user you’re logged in with when you publish the note. Does it not? What are the details of your logged in user in Users > Profile?

I Should Be Able to Rename the SN URL

I took note of that idea here.

This is quite the laundry list of things I think are weird about Jetpack’s Social Notes feature as they are in March 2025.

Keep the feedback coming! 🙂