Notices by James Scholes (jscholes@dragonscave.space), page 2

@JustinMac84 Mastodon already treats all URLs as being the same fixed length, regardless of how many characters they actually are. And I'm talking about apps displaying URLs, not people posting them.

@JustinMac84 Any link starting with "http://" or "https://" will be treated as contributing 23 characters to your post, even if it takes up more or less space than that in reality. So Mastodon is a friendly place to post full, unshortened URLs... which apps then truncate so I can't read them.

The latest winning mark-up from #GitHub turns all release asset download links into table cells, despite them not being in a table:

```
<ul>
<li role="row">
<div role="presentation">
<a href="..." role="cell">...</a>
</div>
<div role="presentation">
<span role="cell">108 Bytes</span>
<span role="cell">
<relative-time datetime="..." title="May 24, 2024, 9:41 PM CST">2024-05-25T03:41:28Z</relative-time>
</span>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
```

#accessibility

Trying not to read anything into the store I ordered a new SSD from needing to manually send me the shipping notification... from a Google Mail address.

@BorrisInABox Cisco's totally not-catchy resolver IP got a chuckle out of me. 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and... oh yeah: 208.69.38.205.

@BorrisInABox You can never be sure. Better up your own efforts just in case.

If you're a #screenReader user and struggling to find the start of responses in the #ChatGPT interface, you can instruct it to add a heading at the start of each one:

1. In the web interface, press the "User" button.
2. In the menu, choose "Customize ChatGPT".
3. In the dialog that comes up, the second multiline text field is labelled: "How would you like ChatGPT to respond?". In this field, you can add something like: "Whenever you respond, prepend a level 1 heading in the Markdown so I can easily find the start of the response with my screen reader.".
4. Near the end of the dialog, ensure that the toggle switch is in the on position, which will confusingly mean it has a label of: "Disable chat preferences". But this does mean it's enabled.
5. Press "Save".

In my experience, this works for something like 96 to 98 percent of responses, and is probably possible with other models too.

#accessibility

A few responses I'm not interested in:
1. I hate AI.
2. I hate OpenAI.
3. I hate ChatGPT.
4. OpenAI should be better at accessibility (true but unhelpful).
5. "This is a level 1 heading, should it be level N?"

To those who've pointed out that I should've probably been using bookmarks all along: those can indeed be exported from the account preferences section on my instance. Unfortunately:

1. I haven't been using them all along; and
2. the CSV only includes post URLs, no text or metadata, so still can't be searched, and hence doesn't come close to solving the problem of searching them.

In the end, it took me over an hour to extract one link from my #Mastodon favourites, as someone who already had a Python environment set up ready to run an archival tool without much fuss.

There's also an unexpectedly large number of tools to export #Mastodon data to #Prometheus. I'm not sure I even understand what Prometheus is, nor why so many people apparently want to export Mastodon data to it.

Some replies have suggested using "in:library" as a search qualifier. Unfortunately, no matter what I specify after it, my instance claims there are no matches.

So, I'm going ahead and using the aforementioned archival tool. I don't like that it's hitting the API to obtain a lot of data that I don't want or need, but I think I've legitimately tried hard enough (short of modifying the software itself) to avoid it.

@BeAware Don't get me wrong, you raise a good point: the archive from the account prefs includes all my posts if I want those, which makes using a third-party tool and the corresponding toll on the server doubly disappointing.

@BeAware But that doesn't include favourites... or at least doesn't say it does.

For people following along at home, I have two replies so far telling me I'm using #Mastodon wrong. In 10 minutes on a Sunday. Impressive.

I found a #Mastodon archiver (https://github.com/kensanata/mastodon-archive). But while it has a `--no-favourites` flag, it doesn't have the reverse (i.e. skip my own posts and only download my favourites). It doesn't seem reasonable, in terms of instance server load, to grab a bunch of data just to throw most of it away.

@listless @GreenSkyOverMe Thank you both for this suggestion! Unfortunately, that returns no results for a very common term, so I suspect that my instance doesn't have full-text search enabled or something. CC @admin

How do people meaningfully search and/or export their #Mastodon favourites? I've been favouriting (not bookmarking) a bunch of useful and/or interesting stuff since I came here, but the data seems difficult to access in a useful way.

When I use my instance's website, there's no search facility on the Favourites page. It only loads a subset of favourites upfront, so without pressing the "load more" button hundreds of times, I can't use my screen reader's find feature either.

When I try the favourites timeline of Semaphore, it also only loads a subset of my favourites, but apparently without a means of loading more of them.

In Mona on iOS, I would likewise have to keep finding, and then pressing, "load more posts".

When I try to find information on the internet about possible qualifiers for searching my own favourites, I get results about API calls and installing Elasticsearch as an instance owner.

In the "import/export" section of my account preferences, it doesn't say anything about favourites, and doesn't make it clear whether my posts archive would include them.

@KaraLG84 Did they? When! Best change ever made to Wikipedia.

@KaraLG84 I just opened an article on my phone, and the edit links are still inside the headings. Are you viewing the mobile layout and/or reader mode?

@KaraLG84 Which article?