@Gargron the solution of hiding the links and only displaying them to unknowing clients and when the media fetch fails is the best one

@wxcafe @Gargron yeah i like this solution too
there's really no reason to have them unless the fetch fails

@Gargron @wxcafe and this gracefully degrades to old/unassuming clients! which is nice

@er1n @wxcafe looks folks i can't just hide the links post-hoc. they're just links. they could be any links. it's really hard and not scalable to match them back to attachments, since they're not even direct file links

@Gargron @er1n well then let’s just remove them I guess 🤷‍♀️

@wxcafe @Gargron could you add an attribute to the link tag indicating that they're media links? or am i ignorant and that Totally Breaks Everything

@wxcafe @er1n maybe the web client could stop inserting them into the text box straight away, and only insert one if the text box is otherwise empty once you click toot..

@Gargron @er1n why do we need anything in the text box.

@er1n @Gargron and, if we need anything, can’t we just make that an invisible character like a zero-width space and be done with it?

@wxcafe @er1n would that character be stripped by the whitespace stripping?

@Gargron @er1n whatever, my point is no-text toots should be a thing, there’s no reason they can’t be empty

@wxcafe @er1n yes, let users spam-click on "toot" with no requirement of effort and create a separate toot for each, no thanks. the reason toots can't be empty is validation, we want to weed spam/garbage out

also even if you wanted to allow empty toots now that would break compat with all previous version of mastodon, imo in a worse and more needless manner than the private toots thing

@Gargron @er1n what

Is it that hard to allow no-text toots if they have media attached? Like

Seriously

@wxcafe @er1n they validation actually is non-trivial to combine, and even tho now they are in the same transaction that could be rolled back, historically they weren't, and as i said these new toots would go into a black hole for all older version of mastodon

@Gargron @er1n ugh

I mean I consider it a valid reason to make a change and since everyone seems to be updating really fast for new features I think it would be fine, but just, ugh

@er1n @wxcafe if the space character will be preserved by ruby's `strip`, that would work. @jeroenpraat suggested using an image frame emoji, that would definitely not be stripped away.

@Gargron @er1n @wxcafe
Although for video and (in the future hopefully) audio this is not perfect.

Maybe a 📎 ?

@jeroenpraat @Gargron @er1n the ZWS are preserved. Audio is apparently not on the roadmap

@wxcafe @Gargron @er1n
Oh I thought I did hear something about someone working on audio. Anyhow, to stay on topic, I still like the paperclip.

@jeroenpraat I opened an issue for it, sometimes ago, but it's assigned to nobody right now.

@wxcafe @Gargron @er1n

@Sylvhem @jeroenpraat @Gargron @er1n gargron Saïda little earlier he didn’t want mp3 sharing cause it would cause copyright problems afaik

@wxcafe Videos and pictures can also cause copyright problems. And, since it's possible to upload videos, one can easily share music if they want. Look at YouTube.

@jeroenpraat @Gargron @er1n

@Sylvhem @jeroenpraat @Gargron @er1n what do I know 🤷‍♀️

@wxcafe @Sylvhem @Gargron @er1n
Here's the thread I correctly remembered: https://toot.cafe/@nick/98841494542307623

@gargron @wxcafe @er1n IMHO it totally makes sense to force users to enter text because I for one like to have some context for art.
And if an artist has to enter they might as well add some tags so people can actually find their stuff.
And those who really absolutely don't want any text can just put an 'x' in there or some other placeholder.

@grainloom @Gargron @er1n I mean i’m not an artist and sometimes I want to post only a picture I guess. It confuses users to have the url and/or to have to have text with a pic to post it, it’s a “feature” (if we can even call that a feature) that twitter has always supported...

@er1n @Gargron @grainloom anyway that’s my vision of it, whatever. It’s not even a big thing and I’m getting frustrated over this so I’m gonna stop talking about it if y’all don’t mind. Sorry

@wxcafe Well, empty toots without attachements would probably be a bad thing though.

@Gargron @er1n

@Sylvhem @Gargron @er1n ... empty toots without attachements is dumb

@wxcafe @er1n @Gargron

it seems like setting the "must be text" thingy to pretend there's text as long as a picture's included

(but I'm not "read into the code", as I like to cryptically describe the people who know the internals are)

@Gargron @er1n what I meant was having the posting client specifically tag them as media links and not displaying them on the receiving client except if the fetch failed tho

@Sylvhem Yeah but people are lazy, and toot a lot, and you'd do it every time...

@Gargron I know, I do it every time :/. For me, it's fine but I'm not an artist though.

@Sylvhem @Gargron It's also easy to assume that having the link in the toot is what makes it show the image as an attachment (like youtube links etc do on twitter).
So people may not realize they can just remove them

@Vann Good point.

@Gargron

@goldie_ice can be done for local toots, but not possible for remote once cause text_url attribute is missing for those

Ahhhhh!

@eecks Nope, they're only there to allow you to not type anything if you chose not to

@eecks But I totally understand that it's confusing, a lot of people get that idea.

@Gargron I’ll make sure my future toots won’t have the ugly links haha— I usually put an emoji if I have nothing to add text-wise