Lumbering Oxen Unite!

https://rant.li/glor/lumbering-oxen-unite

@Kornelis That's normal and intentional on Mastodon's side.

Whereas Mastodon sends toots as Note-type objects (the preferred type for short messages), WriteFreely sends posts as Article-type objects (the preferred type for full-blown, fully formated blog posts). But Mastodon "renders" Article-type objects as links to the original.

This behaviour dates back to 2017. In July, Hubzilla (which supports full-blown blogging with all shebang and with no character limits) was the first Fediverse project to adopt ActivityPub. In September, Mastodon became the second. Until then, both had only been connected via OStatus. And they remained the only ActivityPub implementations until after the standardisation by the W3C in 2018.

The difference was: Hubzilla went straight by spec and sent posts, comments and PMs as Article-type objects. In-bound, it supports just about everything.

Mastodon, on the other hand, only went with the spec as far as that was convenient, as far as that didn't clash with old-school, purist, minimalist microblogging. It sent and still sends toots as Note-type objects.

However, it refused to treat Article-type objects as required. Mastodon used an HTML "sanitiser" to rip out all HTML in incoming content and reduce it to plain text. Formatting, tables, lists, embedded images, all deleted. Because content with text formatting and embedded in-line images isn't old-school, purist, minimalist microblogging.

Hubzilla complained to Mastodon about the latter's way of completely butchering Hubzilla content. At first, Mastodon only justified its doing, if it reacted at all.

But for one, this meant that most Mastodon users would never see content from Hubzilla as it was intended on Hubzilla's side. Mastodon users wouldn't know that what they saw was not what they were to see, partly because Mastodon users could only tell that something wasn't from Mastodon itself by its length, partly because next to nobody on Mastodon knew that stuff like text formatting or embedded in-line images existed somewhere else in the Fediverse. So literally nobody would ever be bothered to look up content from Hubzilla on Hubzilla itself to see it in its original glory.

Besides, AFAIK, what Mastodon did was against the ActivityPub spec.

So Mastodon was torn between sanitising Hubzilla content to plain text (which angered Hubzilla) and fully rendering it in all its HTML glory (which wouldn't be old-school, purist, minimalist microblogging).

What they did was pick the third option: turn Article-type objects, which only came from Hubzilla at that point, into links to the original and not render them at all.

Hubzilla saw this as an act of aggression and of trying to exclude Hubzilla content and reacted upon this by switching from Article-type objects to Note-type objects, even though that technically went against the ActivityPub spec. Up until October, 2022, when Mastodon 4 came out, it still completely butchered anything from Hubzilla, and even Mastodon 4 only allows a very limited subset of HTML in posts, still excluding embedded images. But at least Hubzilla content is readable on Mastodon.

But this may change. It's no longer only about hobbyist projects like Friendica, Hubzilla or WriteFreely that Mastodon has to headbutt with. It's commercial players such as Flipboard which demand that Mastodon render their Article-type objects as intended. And it looks like Mastodon will cave in some more.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Mastodon #Hubzilla #Flipboard #ActivityPub