I have a lot of thoughts on this rich text deal and I have put a lot of them down on GitHub but I still need to vent more
Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone but it was made to fill that exact niche. Short posts with mentions, hashtags, and URLs. Such details give the feel of a platform. The velocity, the atmosphere. On a personal level that's just what I like. And I think it would be reasonable to assume many of those who signed up do, too.
A social network is also a kind of common playground. Individuals have the capacity to spoil it for others. For example, when there was a bug in Mastodon that allowed you to make links spin, many made use of it for fun, which spoiled the experience for people with motion sickness. The more vectors there are for how information is transmitted, the more pronounced this is.
Right now, there is not a whole lot of ways that individual posts can escape their boundaries to affect the whole experience. They can use lots of line breaks or a wall of text, but it's limited by a maximum height. They can use caps, but they don't stand out that much. Custom emoji are one of the weaker spots when people use them as fonts, and that's annoying.
But adding more elements to the mix? More control over visuals? People WILL make it look ugly, that's a guarantee.
@Gargron
Maybe the approach might be akin to how the spoiler tags work now. Maybe as it shows up in the summary, a post is always plain text. And maybe only the first few words show. But when a button / UI element is tapped, that post’s full text with rich text formatting shows.
It would prevent rich text from being an annoying attention-grabber while providing its usefulness for longer posts.
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