Hell yeah, I’m all about this. Article gets rendered so poorly on Mastodon, and the behavior is inconsistent from one platform to the next.

Hmmm … big fan and “heck yea” on the general idea of better UI interop.

But I have (vague) questions about the specifics here.

I recently ranted about this issue (over on masto: here).

I was prompted by the coming of blogs to mastodon feeds but tried to address the issue generally: do we really want to rely on all the content from all the platforms being folded into a single platform, especially a relatively brutalist one like mastodon?

That blogs and microblogs can have meaningful friction is itself a rather ominous alarm on this front IMO.

And so my questions:

• Is this not bigger than Article interop with mastodon?
  • But rather touches on the quality of federation across the whole fediverse in terms of all of the inter-platform UI disparities?
  • IE, For N platforms, there are N * N interop problems where the UI frictions can fail. Without a general solution, that’s exponential.
• Is campaigning mastodon’s devs to improve Article interop where we want to find the fediverse at the this (kinda early/formative) moment when some form of general approach/framework may be necessary?
  • As an example (and I am speaking with a good degree of ignorance on the technical details here) … what about all of the other clients, where differences in markdown rendering (for those platforms that support it) can already cause some issues, albeit minor. Or is this not really about formatting/rendering?
• Are there not more general approaches/solutions that have been thought of?

#FAIWG