Post
Long rant incoming...
I hadn't looked at the BIO text field of my own Mastodon profile on the Web in quite awhile. Long ago I formatted it with one extra carriage return between each paragraph to increase legibility.
But now it's rendered as a compressed, hard to read single blob with no vertical spaces. WTF?!?
Why is Mastodon taking away my agency and butchering my typography? Is this going to happen to our posts next?
This insulting and unnecessary change needs to be backed out!
1/3
@lisamelton From my experience as a developer I wouldn't immediately jump to the conclusion that it's a deliberate action aimed at limiting your expresion (especially if it renders correctly in the edit) it might be that some function that is supposed to 'clean' potentially problematic characters/code/etc is a bit overzealous in deleting white spaces 😉 If it's deliberet then I agree it sucks and can be frustrating if you spent time and energy to make it look nice just for it to be ignored :(
@Iloo It may not be deliberate to limit my expression. No idea.
But pitching a bitch because it seems like that is a good way to get an expeditious fix.
@lisamelton
Ugh, this is annoying!
I too had my bio nicely spaced with line breaks for readability. Now the spaces are gone 😖
I'm not seeing this for reasons which you have explained.
But yeah, I understand why you're furious
@lisamelton Hi Lisa, FWIW it looks okay to me on Ivory.
@soundclamp Thanks. Read the third part of my message.
@lisamelton @soundclamp i adore your patience 😊 (just read the whole thread at once ;)
@lisamelton tech people ignoring, or disregarding, or not even considering consent. Whoda thunk it.
@lisamelton still rendering correctly in Phanpy
@aburka Read the third part of my message.
@lisamelton it looks ok just now, or did you redo it?
@stx Read the third part of my message.
I just looked, rant is deserved
You all know I'm trans. So, I care a LOT about presentation, about how I look and how I'm perceived.
In a medium that is primarily text-based, I would think it's important to preserve the manner in which the author's text is formatted. ESPECIALLY WHEN THAT AUTHOR IS DESCRIBING THEMSELVES!
Look, I might as well just change the BIO text field to:
"See https://lisamelton.net/about/ because Mastodon constrains self expression"
Am I upset about this issue? Yes! Aren't you?
2/3
@lisamelton Has this been on your radar? Might be worth your time!
@lisamelton Ah, that's a shame. The team would really benefit from having you included!
@lisamelton Oh, crap. I just looked. Oh, crap. It looks crappy. :(
@lisamelton What’s weird, if I go to Edit, it displays aa it’s supposed to. If I add a double space, it doesn’t affect the removing of spacing when I click done. (Obviously talking about my bio.)
I hope it’s a temp thing, just a bug.
@CStamp Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it's intentional foolishness.
@lisamelton Yes. It's on mine too. And I don't like it one bit.
If you don't see this behavior in your Mastodon profile, it's probably because you're running an older version of the Web software.
I'm on mastodon.social and it's currently running version v4.6.0-alpha.7+pr-38939-5f3002f.
Again, because I don't normally look at my own profile, I have no idea when this heinous formatting began in the development process.
Because my version is an alpha, I hope that means there's plenty of time for Mastodon to fix this self-inflicted mistake.
3/3
@lisamelton looks like it’s a display error, not changing the underlying data that gets displayed. Looks consistent with the way browsers collapse whitespace if the raw text is embedded in HTML without adding the corresponding tags and/or entities. I’ve lost track, are there Mastodon devs we could tag to bring this to their attention? Would you want them tagged in this thread?
@ShadSterling It appears to be a glitch introduced by a change to the CSS. Unclear whether it was intentional.
@lisamelton it seems to be caused by https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/38920/changes#diff-edd345ee45838ecdc48d8b64ba5f0d4475300e2cc36e696a937fe012a6e025caL8332 and from the context of the PR it seems that hopefully it is not intentional.
@siwek Ah. So this is CSS horkage. Great.
Well, the good news is that it's easily fixed.
@lisamelton Must be a very recent change, because the profile looks fine on infosec.exchange, which is running v4.6.0-alpha.7+glitch.
@jernej__s Interesting! I first noticed it yesterday so, yeah, it's gotta be recent.
@lisamelton FYI: I don’t see the behavior you describe
@sandorspruit Read the third part of my message.
Sis, I read about the new v. of Mastodon, saw examples and *loathed it.
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