@silverpill
The dataset doesn't include some other popular platforms like Friendica, but I am sure they also display long form content just fine.
Friendica and its descendants from the same creator, Hubzilla, (streams) and Forte, can
produce long-form content just fine. With just about all bells and whistles from a title plus six levels of headlines to an unlimited number of images embedded within the text.
So yes, they can display it as well. However, outside of their own communities, hardly anyone knows what they're capable of. Thus, Fediverse developers often try to solve problems that aren't even really there because they were solved before they became problems.
Mastodon's lack of support for articles, linking to the originals instead, is not really a lack. It's a deliberate design decision from around 2017 or so.
See, the first ActivityPub implementation was on Hubzilla. That was in July, 2017. And Hubzilla implemented ActivityPub by the book.
Mastodon followed two months later. But Mastodon has always had its own "interpretation" of ActivityPub that was limited by Mastodon's own intentional design limitations in order to remain Twitter-like, purist, minimalist, old-school, original-gangsta microblogging with as few features that Twitter didn't have as possible.
This is also why Mastodon has a HTML "sanitiser" built in. Up until the release of Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022, that "sanitiser" reduced any and all incoming HTML to plain text. And it did so for all object types, including the Article-type objects which Hubzilla sent. After all, Hubzilla can act as a fully-fledged long-form blogging platform.
However, the ActivityPub spec defines Article-type objects as formatted long-form content. Still, Mastodon defaced Hubzilla's Article-type objects by reducing them to plain text.
So Mike Macgirvin got into contact with Eugen Rochko and told him to adhere to the spec and deactivate Mastodon's "sanitiser" and make it support full HTML rendering for Article-type objects.
And Eugen Rochko said that bold type and italics and bullet-point lists and images in the middle of the content have nothing to do with old-school microblogging, so they have no place on Mastodon, so he won't implement them.
This head-butting went back and forth. Eventually, Eugen presented a "solution". And that was not to render Article-type objects at all anymore. Instead, Mastodon links to them and adds their title above if they have one.
This was only done to shut Mike up so he'd stop complaining about Mastodon defacing Hubzilla posts and breaking the spec by doing so. From Mike's perspective, however, what Eugen did was flip Hubzilla the bird by
completely refusing to show actual Hubzilla content and practically lock out a competitor.
Mike's reaction was to break the spec himself and switch Hubzilla from sending Article-type objects to sending Note-type objects, regardless of Mastodon still defacing them.
With the exception of a very short period after the release of Hubzilla 9.0 when Mario Vavti and Harald Eilertsend learned the hard way that Mastodon still links to Article-type objects, Hubzilla has only sent its posts as Note-type objects ever since.
Mike's other creations have different ways of handling object types.
Friendica, by default, sends posts with titles as Article-type objects and posts without titles as well as comments as Note-type objects. This can be deactivated so that Friendica only sends Note-type objects.
CC: @
Laurens Hof#
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