[HN Gopher] Mastodon: Add support for incoming rich text
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Mastodon: Add support for incoming rich text
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 118 points
Date : 2023-03-06 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| hallqv wrote:
| This feature would make mainstream adoption of Mastodon even more
| unlikely
| Ciantic wrote:
| This feature has very little to do with mass adoption. However
| I did see someone post link to their article in Post.News
| within Mastodon because Post.News supports longer form articles
| with formatting as well as short form content.
|
| For regular people it's much more important how you present
| things in UI. If you show long form content in a short form
| feed so that it jams the timeline, it's obviously bad. But if
| you show long form content behind an extra click it doesn't jam
| the timeline, and suddenly it's more acceptable like in
| Post.News.
| groffee wrote:
| This kind of utterly basic 'feature' should have been a day one
| addition.
|
| Why do people release shit that's not even close to finished?
| Maybe more importantly, why do people even use it?
| capableweb wrote:
| > Why do people release shit that's not even close to finished?
|
| Because why not? Early feedback can shape something based on
| user feedback, rather than taking stabs in the dark.
|
| It is a free and open source project after all, no one has been
| forced to use it.
| vilunov wrote:
| One person's "basic feature" is another person's "a good
| addition" or even "this might be too much". People use it
| because they don't feel about it as strongly as you do, and
| it's been the case for at least the whole lifetime of Twitter.
| mittermayr wrote:
| Does anyone think Mastodon can or will go through similar fork-
| and-spin-off storms as Bitcoin? I feel Mastodon is at a pretty
| okay stage in terms of general completeness right now, but all
| those devs won't just switch into maintenance mode, I assume?
| Seeing the various (also angry) reactions to this PR, it starts
| to smell a bit like someone may want to fork off into a more
| barebones edition.
|
| I made an analytics tool for it, just in case brands decide to
| use it more, but now I am starting to get worried this could very
| well end up as yet another multi-fork-what-is-available-here-and-
| whats-not kind of headache.
| zokier wrote:
| ActivityPub is designed to be interoperable, and even today
| mastodon is far from the only implementation. So forking is not
| really so big deal here.
| anonporridge wrote:
| The concern would be forking of the ActivityPub protocol
| itself, no?
| sp332 wrote:
| As one of the comments points out:
|
| _Posts authored from outside Mastodon can already include
| more formatting, and that has been the case for years_
| noirscape wrote:
| Doubtful. AP is terrible but also generic enough that I
| don't think anyone will ever abandon it.
|
| It's in that sweet spot of being bad enough that anyone who
| has experience with it can sum up a whole myriad of issues
| with it, but at the same time, you're going to be hard-
| pressed to find a different solution that will meet
| everyones goals. It's terrible but it works "well enough".
| djbusby wrote:
| ActivityPub is a worse is better kind of thing.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Fork wars seem likely for any open and distributed network
| project. Although the value of a network is directly
| proportional to the number of people on it, so one fork tends
| to dominate and subsume resources from the others until they
| become a husk hobbling along. This chaos isn't necessarily bad,
| it's just the nature of a network that has no centralized,
| controlling authority to settle disputes. It's one of the
| tradeoffs you take when deciding to avoid centralization.
|
| It's still early enough that fork wars in Mastadon seem likely,
| and would take years to settle. When the first bitcoin fork
| happened, bitcoin cash, happened in 2017, it peaked at a value
| of about 25% of the main chain. Today it's value is about 0.5%
| of the main chain and it is effectively irrelevant.
| Zak wrote:
| There are multiple forks of Mastodon already being run on
| live servers, often ad-hoc forks with minor tweaks. If you
| define fork narrowly enough, even changing the character
| limit might count, and quite a few servers do that.
|
| Most forks do not break interoperability, which is very
| different from Bitcoin forks.
|
| Beyond that, Mastodon interoperates with other software that
| speaks ActivityPub like Pixelfed and Friendica.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| But what would the forkers gain? Bitcoin doesn't seem
| interesting as a precedent because there's no financial gain
| in forking Mastodon. The currency of the fediverse is user
| content. If you can't or don't interoperate, you lose all of
| the content.
| spacewrangler wrote:
| Mastodon is dead
| zokier wrote:
| I'm not opposed to rich text, but I feel this is repeating emails
| mistake of having poorly defined ad-hoc per-implementation html
| subsets instead of formulating a widely accepted spec. This means
| that over time it will be increasingly difficult to ensure that
| implementations are actually able to process the content
| correctly.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yeah, this runs the risk of becoming HTML emails all over
| again, with implementation-detail-defined subsets/supersets and
| rendering differently on every client, with different degrees
| of brokenness.
| screamingninja wrote:
| Mastodon adding rich text support? Sounds like they're trying to
| catch up to the social media platforms of yesterday. MySpace?
| It's funny how things go in cycles. First, we had the simple
| text-based internet, then we added flashy graphics and
| animations, then we stripped it back down again with minimalism
| and flat design, and now we're back to wanting more visual
| stimulation. But hey, why not embrace the nostalgia and bring
| back some of those retro features? Maybe next Mastodon will add a
| customizable profile background with your favorite song playing
| in the background.
| kornhole wrote:
| The fediverse has the opportunity and benefit of rebuilding
| social media from lessons learned of the social media
| platforms. They can replicate and improve the features that
| served users and communities and ditch those that only
| benefited platform operators, commercial advertisers, and state
| censors.
| davidgerard wrote:
| They're trying to catch up to their own forks.
|
| See Eugen start talk about maybe adding quote-posts after a
| pile of Mastodon forks added the Treehouse fork's
| implementation, compatible with the MissKey and Akkoma
| implementations.
| robobro wrote:
| Pleroma has had this for years.... markdown, bbcode, and
| limited HTML support.
|
| Pleroma has a lot of features that Mastodon doesn't, such as
| support for statuses of much longer than 500 chars. There's a
| running gag, "Pleroma does what Mastodon't."
|
| I very much respect the work gargron has done is making
| Fediverse a place that's more moral than Twitter and
| popularizing the space with "normies" ; however it is good to
| note that there are alternatives within the space that do what
| Mastodon doesn't.
| noirscape wrote:
| Pleroma also runs on basically everything, which is another
| big mark in favor of it.
|
| Mastodon is a ruby on rails dinosaur, which to its credit
| scales as well as Ruby usually does. The disadvantage is that
| if you're trying to run something for yourself, you're
| looking at a cost that is hard to justify. Last I tried using
| it, without downtuning sidekiq workers, you get constant CPU
| pressure and ~2GB idle ram usage and that's on a low-cost VPS
| from Hetzner (somewhere below the 10$ mark).
|
| It also caches media like there's no tomorrow, which means
| that you basically need a cronjob to clear out old
| attachments and for 4 years straight you couldn't clean out
| old avatars and headers either.
|
| Pleroma by contrast uses barely any CPU when idle and it's
| ram usage has only rarely exceeded the 300mb mark (and only
| when I foolishly plugged my instance into a relay). Media
| caching is off by default, so it doesn't clog up your disk
| unless you want it to.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| There are images for raspberry pi that you can get started
| with in a single click. Its nice
| citruscomputing wrote:
| If anyone reading this is interested in Pleroma, definitely
| also check out the Akkoma fork -- that's what I, personally,
| see more people using.
|
| https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/
| Pxtl wrote:
| imho one of the best things about Markdown is that even if you're
| not using it, it's pretty-well established a baseline for "these
| are the HTML elements that should be allowed for user styling".
| It's why I cringe every time I see a rich text box that has a
| font-size picker but not heading classes.
| zokier wrote:
| At least the original markdown explicitly allowed embedding of
| arbitrary html in documents
| https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html
| swayvil wrote:
| Does anybody else have trouble with the way Mastodon organizes
| their conversations? It isn't just a straightforward branching
| thread. I think. I'm not sure. Maybe it's the app I'm using
| (tusky). It's just hard. Or maybe it's hard to do branching
| threads ui in the screen space of a phone. I don't know. Reddit
| and hacker news seem to handle it okay
| yborg wrote:
| My biggest problem with Mastodon, although Twitter has the same
| issue, the quoting convention creates context if the reply
| poster adds it, but tweets with lots of replies are similarly a
| morass.
|
| Someone is building a threaded Mastodon client, currently macOS
| only.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@terhechte
|
| Early days, and kind of slow, but looks promising.
| swayvil wrote:
| The threaded style works great. Easy. Time-tested. You'd
| think everybody'd just stick with that.
| bentcorner wrote:
| I'd love to have a tree-view client for activitypub. Not sure
| if anything like that exists already.
| donio wrote:
| I believe this is a client issue. The Mastodon client API gives
| enough information to render a thread tree but most clients
| don't take advantage of it yet.
|
| Fedilab on Android has a nice tree-like thread view.
| gargron wrote:
| This PR is just one part of item MAS-86 on our public roadmap [1]
| "Markdown formatting for posts" which is meant to enable users to
| use code spans/blocks and bold and italic text as championed by
| the Elk third-party app [2]. I believe "rich text" in the PR
| title is a little not nuanced enough because like before I'm of
| the position that Mastodon is the wrong medium for long-form
| articles and the various block-level formatting structures that
| come with it, but allowing users to use bold text without
| resorting to mathematical Unicode characters is a win for
| accessibility.
|
| [1]: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap [2]: https://elk.zone
| robobro wrote:
| Gargron, I know that you are adverse to quote-tweeting, but I
| have a lot of lefty friends who want to stay on Facebook
| despite all the privacy concerns because it lets them share
| memes/news stories with their IRL friends, sometimes adding
| context, without having to worry about their boss / landlord /
| XYZ seeing what they're sharing.
|
| I think that the fact Mastodon allows per-post privacy is a
| great feature, but the lack of private retweets and/or retweets
| with context (eg quote tweets) does scare some people away from
| the platform.
|
| I've seen how quote tweets can be abused, but still believe
| there is some potential good from the feature in Masto. Any
| thoughts?
|
| (Yes, it would be trivial for a third party frontend to add
| quote tweets, but because that's trivial I'm not asking about
| that.)
| gaius_baltar wrote:
| There are forks who use URL unfurling to simulate quotes, so
| I think this can be a good approach if you can convince your
| instance to migrate... but, of course, every other instance
| won't see them nor will the desktop/mobile clients that don't
| implement this feature.
|
| Other fedi implementations (Pleroma, Misskey) seems to
| support this approach too.
|
| For now, easiest way seems to be a manual quote, as we did
| retweets before twitter had RTs.
| Zak wrote:
| > _it lets them share memes /news stories with their IRL
| friends, sometimes adding context_
|
| Why not just copy/paste the image or URL to share a meme or
| news story with added context?
| aceazzameen wrote:
| I don't understand why quote-boosting can't be a user-
| selected option. * Allow users to opt-in/out
| the ability to perform a quote-boost. * Allow users to
| opt-in/out the ability to see others' quote-boosts. *
| Allow server admins to opt-in/out the quote-boost feature.
|
| Wouldn't this solve everyone's issue with quote-resharing?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| The main issue is not covered by any of those cases, it'd
| need to be:
|
| * Allow users to opt-in/out of their posts being quote-
| boosted by others.
| Zak wrote:
| Neither Mastodon nor Activitypub has a permissions system
| that supports that sort of thing. Perhaps it needs one.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Perhaps. My comment wasn't based on technical
| feasibility, but specifying the particular concern which
| is why Mastodon and several other ActivityPub projects do
| not support quote-boosts.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| Ah yes, especially that.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The https://mathstodon.xyz/ instance loads mathjax in the web
| interface which allows people to type latex math in their
| toots.
|
| I would really love it, if there was push from Mastodon, to get
| app developers to also load Mathjax or similar parsing library
| within the app itself.
| CM30 wrote:
| Seems like a good idea for a feature. It helps made content more
| accessible to those using screen readers and other such devices,
| and makes the content more readable than it is with plain text
| alone.
|
| Is it the best platform for long form articles? Maybe not, but to
| be honest, we may as well make things more accessible/readable
| when people do happen to do that, regardless of the original
| intent.
| jmclnx wrote:
| >I have always considered Mastodon's lack of formatting options
| like this to be a fantastic feature, not a deficiency.
|
| Part of a comment from the linked site, please no rich-text. I
| always think when rich-text is allowed it is the first step down.
| Usually when that happens "ne'er-do-wells" start arriving :)
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| That, emoticons and meme insertions ala Teams. That is how you
| know thing is going downhill.
| bluedino wrote:
| I despise Team's "emoji first" design
|
| When you hover over a message, the immediate options are
| emojis. Not reply, copy, but goddamn emojis.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I think reactions are pretty cool. Much faster than having
| to reply, and it's a feature that makes it easier to have
| short discussions. I use it all the time on Teams,
| Messenger, Telegram. And fwiw, it would actually break my
| flow to make them harder to access.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| And worst of all is when someone emojis your message, the
| flow to remove that notification is different. You cannot
| just select the chat and it clears it.
| dreen wrote:
| Probably because large parts of population unfortunately
| prefers communicating with emojis. Curious if this becomes
| a a logographic language in future like Chinease.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| edit: I think you might be onto something. Some novels
| actually addressed that possible outcome ( super sad love
| story being one of them iirc ).
|
| I chuckle at the downvoting that does not address the
| issue. One might argue that it is a generational issue.
| There is an argument to be made that picture is worth a
| thousand words, but some things require precision that
| goes beyond ::eggplant::,::tongue::
| [deleted]
| RobotToaster wrote:
| > I always think when rich-text is allowed it is the first step
| down. Usually when that happens "ne'er-do-wells" start arriving
| :)
|
| That would be _terrible_
| smoldesu wrote:
| We shall allow the ne'er-do-wells to populate Mastodon, but as
| part of the defederated Reddiverse! :)
|
| Honestly though, that was also my impression until I saw the
| implementation. It's really conservatively applied, and doesn't
| clog up the whole screen with text and distractions. Eg. if
| Discord/Slack had heading sizes for standard messages, it would
| be pretty horrible for the user. If our only objection is
| culture alignment, I say they go forward on it. I'd like to
| have code blocks and (eventually?) syntax highlighting for
| posting quick code snippets.
| devinprater wrote:
| Thank you so much for this. I hate that people have to abuse
| Unicode just to get formatting, that screen readers will just...
| Well if sighted people had to read what screen readers spewed out
| for Mathematical italics capital letters, the change would have
| happened years ago.
| noirscape wrote:
| A good start to see Mastodons upstream finally start to implement
| features considered so necessary that they existed in a fork for
| years beforehand[0].
|
| I'm not trying to sound cynical, this is legit a good change.
| Other fedi implementations have supported different message
| formatting (mainly markdown) for ages and that shit still
| degrading away to plaintext on Mastodon is extremely aggravating
| if you decide to (for example) use a bulletpoint list.
|
| [0]: https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/
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