Noticed that the way #Mastodon sanitizes HTML coming from other instances flattens out block quotes in addition to removing other #formatting.
(Totally separate from the quote-toot debate.)
If I follow someone on WordPress or GoToSocial or Calckey etc. and they include an indented quote, when it shows up in Mastodon, it’ll look like the quote is just another paragraph.
That can totally change the meaning of the post!
Found an open issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/15311
It was pointed out that many of this user’s other posts also contained blockquotes, and I fear that I may have misunderstood many of their posts due to there being no indication of this.
Now you might not think this is an issue if you’re not used to being able to post blockquotes in the first place, but if you’re getting them from somewhere else and you don’t know it, that can be a problem.
For instance, the first paragraph in this post isn’t actually written by me, it’s a quote from the original GitHub issue from two years ago. Writing this on GoToSocial it’s trivial to indent it (and if you look at this post on its own site, you should see it correctly!) and it doesn’t make sense for me to have to think about how many of my followers might be on software that actually breaks my posts!
(The missing italics in the second paragraph are less of a problem, but they would be nice to see them go through.)
Ironically if ActivityPub shared the original #Markdown instead of the rendered HTML, the meaning would still be intact, because Markdown matches so closely with the plain-text #semantics that have developed over *decades* of text-only newsgroups, early email, Twitter/Facebook, and so on.