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2026-08-21 14:47:18

rnd@toot.cat

i feel like one thing that #mastodon and #fediverse web uis should be better at is determining when links lead to other fediverse posts and having them open the corresponding post within the same web interface (in context of one's current account), as opposed to just opening a link to the post's direct url

2026-08-22 00:26:15

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@/dev/urandom This would actually be quite counter-productive if it was hard-coded, especially on Mastodon.

See, the Fediverse can create content that Mastodon can't even properly display. Or rather, stubbornly refuses to display because of its self-imposed limitations.

Commercial news platforms like Ghost and Flipboard, specialised long-form blogging applications like WordPress, WriteFreely and Plume, the "Facebook-style social networking" side in the shape of Friendica, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, they can all send messages into the Fediverse that make use of all formatting tricks in the HTML book and then some. But if Mastodon, with whichever frontend, were to display them, it would often completely and utterly deface them.

Mastodon has no support for titles, at least not in messages which it actually displays. It pretends they don't exist.

Mastodon has no support for ordered lists with numbers or letters. It changes them into bullet-point lists.

Mastodon has no support for tables, for horizontal rules, for text colours, for text sizes except in headlines etc. It "sanitises" them into plain, unformatted text entirely.

Most importantly, Mastodon has no support for embedded images and for more than four images in one message.

For example, let's assume someone writes a beautiful travel blog post on WordPress with the ActivityPub add-on activated. The post has ten images embedded between paragraphs with the paragraphs referencing the images.

If Mastodon tried to render this blog post, it would rip all images out of the text where they should be embedded. If you're lucky, it would hang four of these images up underneath the post and silently discard the other six so you'll never know they exist. If you're unlucky, Mastodon would silently discard all ten images.

This, by the way, is the very reason that it's good that Mastodon usually "displays" such posts with their title, their summary and a link to the original that'll open at its source in your Web browser. It'll allow you to see the post as it was intended by the author. Mastodon itself won't.

At the very least, the links in such Mastodon-generated "previews" must continue to lead to their sources and open in a Web browser. The very reason why these "previews" exist is so that Mastodon can keep clinging to its purist microblogging principles while at the same time not defacing the posts which are "previewed" with links.

Also, there must always remain the option to look at messages at their source, and be it stashed away in a menu.

If you want all of this to disappear just so that phone users are spared from their browsers ever popping up whenever they tap something in their Mastodon apps, then you'll deprive the Mastodon users of any way of seeing anything in the Fediverse without Mastodon's limitations.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Flipboard #Ghost #WordPress #WriteFreely #Plume #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte #TextFormatting #RichText