Mentioned-only notes on Mastodon have no markup

2024-10-07 20:46:41

julian

julian@community.nodebb.org

TIL that when you send Mastodon a mentioned-only note, all HTML tags are stripped.

Just... whyyyyyy....

mastodon activitypub

2024-10-07 20:53:21

Kari'boka

kariboka@social.harpia.red

@julian welcome to hell hahahahaha

2024-10-07 20:53:28

BeAware :fediverse:

BeAware@social.beaware.live

@julian tbh, I question most of the decisions the dev team makes. Some are just absolutely mindboggling.

2024-10-07 22:55:58

Mike Macgirvin ?️

mikedev@fediversity.site

My guess is this has something to do with their foray into E2EE several years back that never made it to release (as far as I can tell). The thing about E2EE is that all it takes is one hyperlink to leak the fact that this message contains that particular hyperlink and you can see the encrypted post distribution by monitoring that link endpoint. They probably scrubbed these as a security measure, which is a reasonable thing to do. It's just kind of silly, because the fact that everybody is using UTF-8 in E2EE messages should be much more concerning.

2024-10-08 10:48:27

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

Because Mastodon's HTML "sanitiser" "sanitises" away almost all HTML. Because HTML rendering isn't Twitter-style, purist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. The Mastodon devs staunchly refuse to implement sensible HTML rendering for this very reason.

There are only few exceptions. Bold type, italics, bullet-point lists (numbered lists are converted) etc. And even these have only been implemented since Mastodon 4. The entire first Twitter migration wave and large parts of the second one landed in a seemingly plain-text-only Fediverse.

But quotes of any and all kinds are still "sanitised" away.

2024-10-09 20:30:40

dariusk

dariusk@community.nodebb.org

@julian What's a "mentioned-only" note? Like can you paste in the JSON here? just curious