@kariboka@social.harpia.red @beaware@social.beaware.live Missed opportunity.

Mastodon was modelled after pre-X Twitter, and Twitter, believe it or not, originally allowed you to follow people and post Tweets via text message (SMS). Hence, the original 140 character limit and the original short usernames. Anything longer than that would result in your Tweets being split into two SMS messages. The web interface and smart phone apps came later.

It is interesting that Twitter, and its successors X and Mastodon, have kept the character limits and prefer plain text even though it is no longer technically necessary.

Because Mastodon's HTML "sanitiser" "sanitises" away almost all HTML. Because HTML rendering isn't Twitter-style, purist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging. The Mastodon devs staunchly refuse to implement sensible HTML rendering for this very reason.

There are only few exceptions. Bold type, italics, bullet-point lists (numbered lists are converted) etc. And even these have only been implemented since Mastodon 4. The entire first Twitter migration wave and large parts of the second one landed in a seemingly plain-text-only Fediverse.

But quotes of any and all kinds are still "sanitised" away.

@julian What's a "mentioned-only" note? Like can you paste in the JSON here? just curious

@dariusk the Direct Messages section from @crepels@mastodon.social 's fundamentals has a good breakdown actually!

https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub/

Basically mentioned only means that only those users are addressed... vs. unlisted/followers-only which includes the public and follower collections.

@mikedev@fediversity.site tell me about it. Don't get me started on how mentions are abused as a form of addressing.

And, are people happy on Bluesky?