@julian
Whether this is actually true or not, I do not know.
Itâs true. Mastodon reduces Article-type objects to the title, if there is any, the summary, if there is any, and a link to the original page. Itâs intentional and by design.
Hubzilla managed to prove it with the 9.0 release several weeks ago. Up until then, Hubzilla posts went out as Note-type objects. The 9.0 release introduced a switch for the entire channel that defaulted to sending Article-type objects and could be switched back to Note-type objects. And all of a sudden, anything that came from Hubzilla was rendered as described above. The Hubzilla community had largely all but forgotten about it. A hotfix disabled the switch and hotwired Hubzilla to Note-type objects until 9.0.1 removed it again.
The actual reason of this behaviour is because Article-type objects tend to be blog posts with all bells and whistles. Text formatting, headlines, horizontal rules and, most importantly, an arbitrary number of images embedded anywhere within the post.
Mastodon, however, is so âoriginal gangsta purist microbloggingâ that it refused to support any of this up until version 4.0. And even since version 4.0, it can only render the former two.
In other words, if Mastodon tried to render a blog post as-is, itâd fail miserably and botch it big time. Like, rip four of the embedded images out of their embedding, leave them dangling below the post, and throw all images that go beyond these four away altogether because Mastodon canât handle more than four images.
And this mangled rendering of the blog post would literally be the only way that most Mastodon users would experience the post. There wouldnât be a big button thatâd take them to the source. Thereâs a button, but stashed away in a pop-up menu that isnât labelled as containing such a button.
The next-best alternative would have been for Mastodon to include full support for everything that can be done with Markdown or HTML or Friendica/Hubzillaâs expanded BBcode. But, again, that wouldnât be purist microblogging. Thatâd be un-Mastodon-like.
So the only alternative left was to not render the post at all and link to the original instead.
The Hubzilla community is fully convinced that Mastodon took this step to flip the bird at Hubzilla.
In order to understand this idea, there are a few things to understand. First: When Mastodon was launched, it immediately federated with Hubzilla which had already been there. Both communicated via OpenMicroBlog, the predecessor of OStatus.
Next: Hubzilla was the first Fediverse project to implement ActivityPub in July, 2017, when it wasnât even a W3C standard yet. Mastodon was the second, some two months later. For quite a while, it was just these two.
Finally: We all know how limited Mastodon is. Hubzilla, on the other hand, had inherited its text formatting capabilities from Friendica, and theyâre immense. If you can do it in a blog post, you can do it in a Hubzilla post.
Only that Mastodon couldnât render any of it.
AFAIK, Hubzilla kept asking Mastodon to implement full HTML rendering for posts so itâd stop mangling posts from Hubzilla and Friendica. Mastodon staunchly refused because thatâd go too far beyond purist microblogging and Twitter-mimicking. Same reasoning as for hard-coding the 500-character limit.
Eventually, Mastodon introduced this switch plus the specific handling for Article-type objects. But instead of being a special mode that does have full HTML rendering capabilities as demanded by Hubzilla, it just creates a link to the original.
For Mastodon, itâs keepinâ it real and sticking to purist microblogging. For Hubzilla, itâs a way to spite them and their silly text formatting and image embedding antics. Hubzilla still holds a grudge against Mastodon for this.
But that ought to change. The question is how, but this WG is not at the point where we start throwing around decrees and making up standards.
The only way for this to change is if you went to Mastodonâs GitHub repository and filed an issue which labels this behaviour as a bug. And if as many other Fediverse projects as possible joined in on the same issue. And if the pressure on Mastodon became so big that they cave in and introduce all rendering capabilities necessary to show a long-form blog post the way itâs supposed to look.
Again, Hubzilla has tried it which led to the creation of this phenomenon. Others have tried it, too. And Iâm not even sure if a vast alliance of Fediverse devs could change it.
After all, Mastodon is in such a position that it doesnât even have to act. It presents itself to the majority of Fediverse users as the one and only fully-featured Fediverse standard and implies that everything that deviates from it is broken.
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