Photographers and artists rejoice—just like in the official iOS and Android apps, pictures are no longer cropped to 16:9 on the web version of Mastodon. Link previews have also gotten a face lift, and will now show both the article date and author when available.
@Gargron Will link previews support WebP and AVIF?
That’s becoming a bigger issue by the day as more sites choose to use those image formats for og:image and the Mastodon server doesn’t understand those.
@Gargron thanks! in genera it would be nice if the platform became a photographers-friendly, so people could also move from instagram. For example, there it’s not possible to view high-res images. Posting some food - sure, enjoying art - meh.
It's a good question. And some people do genuinely create very tall artworks, some webcomics use a tall format for example.
They assume however that the image will be displayed in a non-disruptive way. I don't know what will happen if every tall image is displayed uncropped and full width.
@tkk13909@Gargron@feditips several years ago, there was a meme shared on da’book- that did this and people felt like it was trolling. I didn’t, just playing with affordances. With this graphic, and the intensity of information presented, will people feel like it is trolling?
That was a highly misleading article. Mastodon isn't a network, it's thousands of independent sites.
It's like the world wide web, you wouldn't hold Tim Berners Lee responsible because there are shady websites. All he did was invent the technology that lets anyone create a website.
If one server decides to do something terrible/illegal, the other servers block it and tell other servers to block it. That's why you cannot see these problematic servers from your server.
@feditips@Gargron Thank you for this, Fedi.Tips, but it does seem like there should be more ways to in the federation to catch or block this type of material - it should be like Gab. Stuff like that on the www gets pushed to the dark web at least. We are at a moment when we have an opportunity to truly be a non-corporate option for many people. Dorsey, Musk and Zuck are moving to "don't remove, just don't amplify" approaches which seem somewhat similar.
"Stuff like that on the www gets pushed to the dark web at least."
There's no such thing as the dark web, there's just the web.
Anyone can create a website and put anything they want on it. The way to deal with nasty content is to block the site and report it to the authorities, who will hopefully take it offline.
Unfortunately if a site is hosted in a country where that content is legal (which is the case in Japan), then the only option remaining is blocking it.
Musk and Zuck are running centralised servers so they have complete technical control over content.
There is no centralised service here, each server is totally independent and no one has control over it except its owner and the authorities in the country where it is hosted.