@hellquist Was there a link to the article? 🙂
@ercanbrack
Yes, on the word Opinion.
@hellquist
It seems the rich text rendering of links is not universally useful. I noticed that when I am looking at my own interlinked toots from different mastodont instances, links and generally rich formatting are stripped.
Lesson: when speaking to others about links we want them to click, always include a naked link. Proper links are more useful when speaking to self.
No fancy anything. Just text of which the last line being the link URL copied straight from browser adressbar.
That original post is simultaneously posted to Twitter. It also gets picked up by Friendica and re-posted (as opposed to re-shared) as an original post by my Friendica user. Finally, that Friendica post gets re-shared on Pleroma.
I only have a few contacts on more than one of those services, but am aiming to clean it up further. The reason I've been using them all is due to (obviously testing, but also) them having slightly different people on the platforms, and (quite importantly), they run at "different speed". My pleroma flow is the fastest. I could easily miss good readable (often longer than a "Great lunch I just had!") posts on it as they simply move off the screen too fast.
That fast movement can be mitigated by adding people (such as yourself @FailForward ) either to "lists" or as a contact in Friendica too. Then I get the more readable/longer content in a separate stream.
Pleroma doesn't support "lists" in its default front-end, so only when I am using either the Mastodon front-end or Soapbox (a Pleroma "theme") can I even see the "lists" functionality.
However, I like the fact that Friendica "sits in the middle" of the Fediverse, and is compatible with pretty much all the other services. Perhaps I should contemplate doing my original posts in Friendica instead. Hmm...
The downside, for me, with Friendica is that posts are using BBCode (which I have to look up every time I use) compared to Diaspora which uses Markdown (which I know already, and which I find neater/faster).
re friendica & markdown: I looked into it and apparently there is an addon for friendica enabling Markdown, so if you self-host, that would be an option. For public services it seems the only way to find out is to create an account.
I explored the HTML stripping and rendering issue and concluded that it's completely out of control of the original poster. There are at least 3 places where rendering changes can happen:
1. your home instance when you post can strip rich text formatting (it certainly does convert markdown or whatever you use to html which is the raw ActivityPub transport, c.f., https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/11115)
2. when the status/post is federated, the receiving instance can strip any rich formatting
3. even when the formatting survives all that, the end-user client can choose to render or strip: Web ap vs. FediLab vs. Tusky.
In between these 3 there's plenty what can go wrong. For me, the lesson learned is that when communicating to others, go as plain as possible - make no assumptions on client rendering (e.g., no embedded links). When just noting for self to display on your timeline/wall, do whatever you like.
For comparison how just different Mastodon instances (not speaking of completely different platforms) display the same toot:
- https://qoto.org/@FailForward/105645352449165283
- https://mstdn.social/@calculsoberic?max_id=105646478895847045 <-- search for the same boosted toot in the timeline
BTW, a trick to discover how a toot would look at a different instance, look for boosts or responses from that instance and then browse the display at their timeline.
