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1. Embed this notice
   Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:13:06 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

   Yesterday, as on every Friday, I updated my public servers. This time I was on the train, so a bit of a flaky connection. I am old school, so I logged in to my machines, started a `screen` session and ran the `def update`there. This way I could be reasonably sure it would work even if my connection breaks.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:18:37 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Mastodon Engineering

     Oh, and dear @MastodonEngineering — when will you finally accept the PRs that bring some basic (markdown) formatting to posts? #kthxbai

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:26:31 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Hendrik Bunke

     @hbunke Yep, `tmux` is the new screen (since quite some years ;)

   • Embed this notice
     Hendrik Bunke (hbunke@openbiblio.social)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:26:32 JST Hendrik Bunke

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer Oh, screen is old school…?

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:54:59 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Stefan Bohacek
     • Mastodon Engineering

     @stefan Everybody has different priorities. I trust @MastodonEngineering to make the right decisions. I just think that allowing bit more formation for posts has a potentially big impact on making Mastodon more appealing to (new) users. Note that the rendering of HTML in posts in the timeline already works since quite some years. It's "only" about adding markdown support when creating/editing posts.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Saturday, 23-Nov-2024 23:55:00 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     • Mastodon Engineering

     @jwildeboer @MastodonEngineering Given that the company can only afford to pay 3-4 full time developers, I think they should prioritize features around user safety and moderation.

     https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues?q=%20is%3Aissue%20is%3Aopen%20sort%3Areactions-%2B1-desc

     (But yes, Markdown formatting would be neat!)

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:15:54 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Stefan Bohacek

     @stefan The thing about Markdown support is that it has come up frequently over the years, other ActivityPub implementations like Misskey, Glitch etc have it since years. Several attempts have been made in the form of pull requests, but they always ended up being neglected. A clear yes/no statement form Mastodon devs on wanting/not wanting this is missing, adding to the frustration. See https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23981 for related links to issues/PRs.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:15:55 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer Apologies for the rant, but the thing I'd like people to start doing is, every time they say "here's a great feature we should add" to follow that with "and here's how we'll pay for it" with a donation link.

     (For Mastodon, that would be https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors.)

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:15:56 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer Sometimes they just end up working on smaller features, like the recently released author tags (which I love and use!), and now there's just not enough resources to tackle the big and difficult stuff.

     People might've complained about quote boosts, but they're now choosing Bluesky, which lacks a ton of useful features Mastodon/fediverse already has, like editing your posts, or not broadcasting a list of everyone you blocked.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:15:56 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer Looking at the list of GitHub issues I shared, disabling replies has 717 thumbs-ups, quote-boosts are at 220. I've seen people announce leaving the fediverse not over missing features, but their safety. And when they leave and tell their friends they're not safe here, no fancy features will convince them to give us a try.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:15:57 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer

     "Everybody has different priorities"

     "trust to make the right decisions"

     Right. The thing that is starting to bug me, to be quite honest, and this is not a criticism specifically of you, mind you, is that people asking for all these different features, which are mostly nice-to-haves, have been causing the tiny team to lose their focus, trying to please everyone, and stretching themselves thin.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:24:17 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Stefan Bohacek

     @stefan ActivityPub explicitly supports html in posts and Mastodon renders that since 4.1 IIRC. The real question boils down to if Mastodon will implement some sort of editor for posts that supports inputing $SOMETHING (could be markdown or become etc) that gets rendered to html and posted that way. Technically not a big thing and as I said, other implementations have done this already. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18872#discussioncomment-7886386 says it is on the roadmap, so I feel OK asking for it again after 2 years :)

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 01:33:57 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Stefan Bohacek

     @stefan And yes, this limbo situation is a bit frustrating to me and others. We even came up with a little tool to convert mastodon threads to markdown, so I can copy/paste threads into my blog with the correct syntax ;) https://mtr.wildeboer.net

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 02:44:10 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Stefan Bohacek

     @stefan Sure. Which I do (the take out the wallet part) See https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/113533486068298743

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 02:44:11 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer Not much more we can do, I guess, just vent our frustration, and take out our wallets, or learn to code with Ruby.

   • Embed this notice
     Stefan Bohacek (stefan@stefanbohacek.online)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 02:44:12 JST Stefan Bohacek

     in reply to

     @jwildeboer Neat!

     Yes, we are in a tough spot. Another big frustration, missing fediverse replies, is finally seeing some work being done to address this only because an outside contributor took it upon themselves. The code is being reviewed by someone from the team, which is great, but again, it took years for a feature that I think is core to the experience to get the attention it needs.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 03:16:15 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput
     • David Roetzel

     @renchap @dave I will not give up hoping (and nudging ;). I know that yous have agreed that the glitch-soc approach isn’t feasible. But some sort of input wrangler solution that allows for posts containing the formatting that mastodon already renders for HTML posts coming in through federation would be much appreciated.

   • Embed this notice
     Renaud Chaput (renchap@oisaur.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 03:16:16 JST Renaud Chaput

     in reply to

     • David Roetzel

     @jwildeboer This is on the roadmap, but it requires a complete replacement of the status parser, which is a complex endeavour with security & performance impacts. @dave started experimenting on the topic but we did not find a good way yet.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 03:49:42 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput
     • David Roetzel

     @renchap @dave My approach would be simple. Federation in both directions in/out with html. Incoming posts never need to be edited. So input parsing could result in a defined intermediate state after sanitisation, which gets stored on the instance. Rendered to html when showing or federating. So for editing you have the internal representation. My preference for that internal state would be markdown, obviously ;)

   • Embed this notice
     Renaud Chaput (renchap@oisaur.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 03:49:43 JST Renaud Chaput

     in reply to

     • David Roetzel

     @jwildeboer @dave What you describe is what we want to build, and what has the issue I outlined above.
     Claire, the GlitchSOC maintainer, is part of the Mastodon team, and she herself says that we should not re-use what Glitch does because it has issues.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 03:55:22 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput
     • David Roetzel

     @renchap @dave Clients (be it the web UI or any mobile client) could implement whatever editor for whatever format but send the plain text version and their try of the internal representation that the instance will try to interpret (and sanitise) and if that fails, fall back to the plain text variant.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 04:04:53 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput
     • David Roetzel

     @renchap @dave effectively meaning that current API remains unchanged and backwards compatible by extending it with an optional internalRich field when posting and adding the internalRich content as an option when editing.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 04:27:01 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput
     • David Roetzel

     @dave @renchap Full-blown markdown support including the various flavours doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, TBH. Tables and heading levels? Overkill ;) But basic bold, italics, links, quotes and code would make things so much better :)

   • Embed this notice
     David Roetzel (dave@upp2.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 04:27:02 JST David Roetzel

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput

     @jwildeboer @renchap FWIW what you are describing is mostly how it already works today. We "just" need to replace the current formatter with a markdown parser. Federation is not affected at all. But we do a *lot* of formatting of posts, so we need to be sure performance does not hurt too much. Depending on the specific markdown parser there are also subtle issues with parsing and marking up of @-mentions, hashtags etc. This can all be solved and it is on my agenda, but not with the highest prio.

   • Embed this notice
     Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: (jwildeboer@social.wildeboer.net)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 04:36:40 JST Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

     in reply to

     • Lauren Weinstein
     • Renaud Chaput
     • David Roetzel

     @dave @renchap Knowing that it’s on the roadmap makes me feel a lot better already. I’ll try to get some help from my network to help you make it happen :) cc @lauren do you know of Ruby and markdown devs that could help here?

   • Embed this notice
     David Roetzel (dave@upp2.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Nov-2024 04:36:41 JST David Roetzel

     in reply to

     • Renaud Chaput

     @jwildeboer @renchap Agreed, that is pretty much what we are thinking as well.