@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).
@hellquist @FailForward It’s interesting that you mention BBCode and Markdown. Everything that I see in my Mastodon clients seems to be just basic text. What specifically are you doing to your text in your posts? ie Bold, Italics, etc?
🙂 Try to use Mastodon web interface and click either on my profile, or click on the timestamp of this toot (top right corner - it's the toot age).
# What you will see
## Will probably surprise you
1. but **maybe** not _too much_
2. still can be an ~~interesting~~ experience
Either way, you'll see different stuff than you are used to.
| a | b | c | d | e |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| xxx | | **uuu** | | |
| | rr | | | |
and maybe even something else
<img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Raster_graphic_fish_40X46squares_hdtv-example.png/675px-Raster_graphic_fish_40X46squares_hdtv-example.png" width="100%"/>
Like it?
If you look at this via some app, most likely **half** is plain _text_ and the rest is scrambled.
Here's a comparison of what you experience and what I experience on Mastodon. Very different...
While we are at this, maybe you can show me how were the different renderings of the boosted friendica post you sent yesterday about northern England. Here's how I experience it at QOTO. I also saw how it looks natively at Friendica (basically the same). Could you perhaps upload a screenshot how it looks like at usual Mastodon instances (or Pleroma)?
I'm having all kinds of issues trying to upload the screenshots on this Friendica instance, but this is what it looks like on the mastodon front-end of Pleroma (which is a mod of the "real" Mastodon front-end).
Well, it's clear what is going on. The post is federated in its raw HTML form. The mess of the display which happens then is clearly screw-ups of the individual front-ends which themselves chose to either strip or not the HTML tags before sending it to the browser. Also, some clients/front-ends obviously "overdo" in that they add a thumbnail card, or additional profile picture, or the attached image. This makes sense when you expect that east status/post will be plaintext. If it's not, you either should not touch it, or completely strip it.
My conclusion from this is that I absolutely cannot rely on how my posts will be rendered to others. Sometimes also essential information is stripped, e.g., links included via `a` tag or images included via `img` tag - very bad.
To be on the safe side - if you want a post to be widely shared, it should stick to the original Mastodon plaintext format.
In other words, what we have here is a classic FOSS issue: backend architecture and protocols - great. Front-end: semi-fail. Like taking it to 85% of the job, where the remaining 15% are so obvious that it sends casual end-users crying, while techies like most of us just shrug, accept the damage and move on.
Personally I'm thinking "right, I could of course start my own instance of Friendica, and get it all set-up right. I could probably even create a front-end for Pleroma that avoids a few of the things we've mentioned here" but then that would only apply to me and my social presence, not the one of my friends.
So then I start thinking "should I perhaps set my instance up for just a few friends?" before I realise that I a) have no wish to be an admin for others and their services and b) if my stuff goes down for whatever reason, that is fine. I'm not so sure I would be happy if I was a user in such a set-up though. So no. I don't want to host services for others. Back to square 1. :)
I start to think about Fediverse not as platforms (Mastodon, Friendica, etc.), but rather in terms of instances. Many instances are heavily customised. Me joining qoto.org gives me a completely different experience than you joining friendica, or mastodon.online, or whatever else. In effect, my experience with rich text formatting, etc. at qoto.org is somewhat similar to what you'd get on friendica plain. But with those fast timelines... I imagine other platforms (like Pleroma, or glitch-soc) are modified towards other mixture and weighing of the same ingredients in a slightly different outcome.
So maybe the solution for your friends is this:
- let them join an instance which you recommend (if you have any power over that) to make sure than among your group you will share good experience and tech features.
- of course outside that single platform it's not going to be great, but those are those other people.
- so there will be some frustration, but most of it will be kept outside your circle of friends/family.
Something like that...
@hellquist @FailForward Agreed! I’ve researched a lot, and I think the Fediverse is the future. I just have to figure out how best to use it, so that I can recommend it to friends in a way that will offer the best experience possible. 🙂
