Emojis lost in ActivityPub federated posts

Software Discourse
1

Emojis inserted in a Discourse post are lost when federated (tested on Mastodon).

This happens with basic emojis with common syntax like :tada:



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2

So does everything else, that is markdown, bbcode etc. Including all images.

That is by design, I suppose.



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3

Jagster:

So does everything else, that is markdown, bbcode etc. Including all images.

@Jagster, would the undermentioned be an example, consequently?

https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/oneboxes-and-uri-separators-are-not-synchronised-when-federated/5292?u=rokejulianlockhart

Jagster:

That is by design, I suppose.

…why? We’re not discussing CSS here – the actual markup of the page must be preserved in order for the original content to be considered federated.

Stripping an HTML page of its HTML would generally render that page unreadable. That applies to CommonMark.



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4

rokejulianlockhart:

why

I don’t know. Perhaps someone how knows better will chime in. But I could guess it has something to do with how Discourse is baking content. Or not.

But AFAIK this isn’t a bug, but more like another #feature request



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5

Jagster:

But AFAIK this isn’t a bug, but more like another #feature::category request

@Jagster, actually, I think it is, because per the citation, some formatting is preserved - s. Either all or none should be, surely?



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6

Matter of definition

  • a bug is when something is coded, but it does something that breaks places
  • bad UX, missing features etc. aren’t bugs, because the code does what is asked


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7
Jagster:

bad UX, missing features etc. aren’t bugs, because the code does what is asked

@Jagster, more nuance that merely those criteria applies:

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/58454/385519



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8

Big question is if these emojis are Unicode emojis. If not, then they are normally displayed as images. And inline images aren’t supported by many AP systems. Your example :tada: for example seems to be an image.

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9

@heluecht, why aren't they converted into the Unicode counterparts, instead of images?



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10

I believe the point is: in Discourse, :tada: generates and emoji, and at least in Mastodon clients :tada: generates an emoji as well. So why not keeping :tada:?

The fact that the actual emoji images rendered might be from different emoji icon sets and therefore look slightly different is irrelevant.



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