For puzzled Mastodon users reading my posts, I keep forgetting about Mastodon ignoring blockquote tags. Need to update Micro.blog’s cross-posting and ActivityPub to automatically change the output to use regular quotes.
@manton this would be a huge help! All my posts happen on micro.blog but I end up having more conversations on mastodon.
@manton wait. But Mastodon supports rendering [markdown links](https://help.micro.blog/t/markdown-reference/30)?
@manton ah, no. Thought I missed something. Guess in-line links in your post is a result of micro.blog sending html within ActivityPub
@rmateu Yep, Mastodon does support HTML links, but basically nothing else... No bold, italic, block quotes, etc. Links are great, but of course I want a little more HTML in there too. 🙂
@manton I have to say, the timeline respecting a set of HTML is one of my favorite things about Micro.blog that almost no one else in the "social feed" world does. Seems silly-- we know how to support "safe" subsets of HTML. I really appreciate blockquote and code and basic em, strong, li, etc support here.
@jsonbecker @manton +1. Also, thanks for supporting Markdown which Mastodon should also do if they are serious about "micro-blogging"
@manton agree. I'm sure there's hundreds of post discussing it already (and will actually look at them this time), but just supporting a subset/links seems more dangerous than all tags. Things like <a href="https://www.scambankwebsite.com/">realbank.com</a> might look more real if links are the only supported tag.
I'm for all markdown, everywhere. But fun times ahead for ActivityPub discussions.
@jsonbecker Thanks! Yeah, HTML seems like such a simple thing but it really makes a difference for embracing the web as it is instead of creating another layer on top of the web.
@rmateu Yes, the bank link example could be a real problem... I believe some Mastodon forks have a setting to always show the domain name in parenthesis. App.net had that too. I think we'll want that on Micro.blog too, especially on mobile where you can't hover over links.
@manton it’s always surprising to me how much content is clearly trying to reproduce essentially what Markdown is to format social posts with no movement for formal support. Seems way more important than quote posts.
@RianVDM Yep, 500 is in the plans. I'll have a longer blog post about how we're adjusting to this in the next month or so.
@jsonbecker I think the premise of quote posts is flawed. A quote post should just be a post with a quote! The only reason to treat it differently is if your format can't support inline quoting or if you want to measure a quote's reach, which has its own problems. Otherwise it's just a UI problem.
@jsonbecker @manton Seconded! Quote posts are superfluous and unneeded in comparison to Markdown. How it still isn’t supported in the official Mastodon platform is beyond me. There’s so much semantics and emphasis that would be genuinely useful with Markdown.
@manton I think formatted posts with quotes and attribution gets all of the value, format it how you want. A literal enclosure of the quoted post is not necessary. It’s just blockquote and a link with in-reply-to all the way down.
@manton I've rolled out a fix for this. Quotes from Micro.blog now look pretty good on Mastodon too.
