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re: better handling of non-notes by Mastodon

Toward the end of a day 2 FediForum session, @pfefferle@mastodon.social, @manton@manton.org, and I sidetracked a bit and discussed once again the tendency for implementors to shift away from more suitable ActivityStreams Activities to as:Note.

Specifically, it was the demo/session by @samsethi@podcastindex.social re: TrueFans. Instead of federating out an as:Listen, they send as:Note, and it's a fairly safe bet that this is because the content cannot be richly represented in Mastodon. The same story played out with Mattias and the WordPress plugin, and myself with NodeBB.

Secondly, back in March/April and again in May, @renchap@oisaur.com mentioned that resolving this was of some interest to the Mastodon team:

We will work on improving the display of non-Note content in the next Mastodon version

To be clear, getting Mastodon to suitably process as:Article/as:Listen/as:Offer or any number of other activities is not what the ForumWG wants to accomplish. It's not up to Mastodon to adapt to the variety of content on the fediverse, but rather that its fallback handling needs to improve just enough so that its baseline rendering is acceptable to more implementors and their users.

As concise and actionable as I can make it:

  1. Mastodon allows a subset of HTML for as:Note. This subset is good enough, but content in non-notes has all html stripped. Keep consistency here and allow the same subset of HTML.
  2. Non-note content is truncated. This is no longer necessary due to the addition of the expand button. The wonderful thing is this standardization of behaviour actually simplifies Mastodon code.
  3. Instead of appending the object URL to the status content, promote the "Open Original Page" button out of the overflow menu. It's more than okay to defer to the original site vis-a-vis presentation and allow the user a smooth exit if desired (target="_top" would be okay too if you're worried!)

That's it.

You could even skip the third point, but even with 1 and 2 achieved this would sufficiently raise the baseline behaviour just enough that I would immediately update NodeBB to send as:Article for new topics, and I am certain @pfefferle@mastodon.social would adjust his defaults as well.

Lastly, @renchap@oisaur.com, I'm sure I can speak for everyone at FediForum when I say that it was wonderful to see representatives from Mastodon (that of course includes @andypiper@macaw.social as well) in attendance. It means a lot to me personally that you were there, and sends a signal that Mastodon continues to desire broader inter-compatibility.

GitHubFederation with Bookwyrm (hashtags, reviews) is essentially broken. · Issue #29981 · mastodon/mastodonBy fabiscafe

@renchap@oisaur.com it's an oft-repeated refrain that the Mastodon team has a lot of their plate. With bug fixes, existing feature pipeline, and now your funded work with fediscovery, issues important to other implementors might fall by the wayside or seem less important.

The easiest thing for us to do is to impress upon you and your colleagues the importance of this for the wider fediverse. You have @pfefferle@mastodon.social from WordPress, @mike@flipboard.social from FlipBoard, and @michael@newsmast.social from NewsMast, and likely others who would be on board (@hongminhee@fosstodon.org with Fedify/Ghost?) with switching away from as:Note (I can't speak for them, but probably?)

The second easiest thing here would be to have a developer make a PR against the Mastodon repo. I'd love to also make this happen (funding and such permitting).

@hongminhee @julian @renchap @pfefferle @mike @michael

That's an interesting idea using as:preview to carry an as:Note representation of the activity, abd would probably be pretty easy to integrate, I think?

@thisismissem @hongminhee @julian @renchap @mike @michael but isn't this a hack we only might have to add because of the summary/content-warning thingy?

@thisismissem@hachyderm.io @hongminhee@fosstodon.org Yeah that's something I haven't seen before. Would love to get @johnonolan@mastodon.xyz's take on it.

Blog software has the concept of "excerpts", which I think fits well with that idea.

@pfefferle@mastodon.social is right though... this is likely only because an excerpt can't be sent in via summary, otherwise it gets treated like a CW.

@julian @thisismissem @hongminhee @johnonolan but that's no longer completely true. You can send a `summary` if `as:sensitive` is false :)

only if `as:sensitive` is set to true, the `summary` will be used as content warning.

@pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan

Hmm.. I wonder what @samsethi was hitting into the other day then? He said something about summary marking posts as sensitive incorrectly

@thisismissem @pfefferle @julian @hongminhee @johnonolan @samsethi did this change in a recent Mastodon version? Have client apps caught up with it?