Mentioned-only notes on Mastodon have no markup
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@julian tbh, I question most of the decisions the dev team makes. Some are just absolutely mindboggling.
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Kari'bokareplied to BeAware :fediverse: on last edited by [email protected]
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BeAware :fediverse:replied to Kari'boka on last edited by
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.
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Kari'bokareplied to BeAware :fediverse: on last edited by
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@[email protected] @[email protected] Missed opportunity.
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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.
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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. -
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 the Direct Messages section from @[email protected] 's fundamentals has a good breakdown actually!
https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub/
Basically mentioned only means that only those users are addressed... vs. unlisted/followers-only which includes the public and follower collections.
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@[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. -
@[email protected] tell me about it. Don't get me started on how mentions are abused as a form of addressing.
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And, are people happy on Bluesky?
