Mentioned-only notes on Mastodon have no markup

BeAware :fediverse:

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

Kari'boka

@BeAware @julian it is really a pitty that #mastodon became the face of the #fediverse. Here in #Brazil it ruined every chance to become a thing, that's why everybody migrated to #bluesky.

BeAware :fediverse:

@kariboka @julian agreed.

I've even directly asked the dev team for an automated reporting system for specific keywords like regex, but was flat out told that it wasn't gonna happen.

Then right before the Brazil thing happened, the biggest complaint on Fediverse was moderation issues.

Kari'boka

@BeAware @julian We had to advertise everything ourselves because mastodon didn't even had accepted (for 2 years) Brazilian instances in the join mastodon page.

Only now (last week) they've added 2.

julian

@[email protected] @[email protected] Missed opportunity.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

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.

Scott M. Stolz

Mastodon was modelled after pre-X Twitter, and Twitter, believe it or not, originally allowed you to follow people and post Tweets via text message (SMS). Hence, the original 140 character limit and the original short usernames. Anything longer than that would result in your Tweets being split into two SMS messages. The web interface and smart phone apps came later.

It is interesting that Twitter, and its successors X and Mastodon, have kept the character limits and prefer plain text even though it is no longer technically necessary.

Jupiter Rowland

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.

dariusk

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

julian

@dariusk the Direct Messages section from @[email protected] 's fundamentals has a good breakdown actually!

Understanding ActivityPub - Part 1: Protocol Fundamentals

(seb.jambor.dev)

Basically mentioned only means that only those users are addressed... vs. unlisted/followers-only which includes the public and follower collections.

Mike Macgirvin 🖥️

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Just so there are no misunderstandings, these delivery/privacy modes and rules are all (flawed) Mastodon constructs and have no basis in ActivityPub or ActivityStreams. Other fediverse software may or may not honour these modes; which lean heavily on mentions or lack of mentions and whether or not a particular address is in the to field or the cc field.

julian

@[email protected] tell me about it. Don't get me started on how mentions are abused as a form of addressing.

Ema エマ

And, are people happy on Bluesky?