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There sure are a bunch of non-developer "experts" on how the software that makes up this fediverse works. Hell, even I'm not an expert on anything but postActiv and GNU social, but pissing blimey some of the things people say (like *that* yes) just betray a fundamental ignorance at such a basic level I have to wonder how they managed to register an account.
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So, let me break something to ya, new boy, the internet or "interconnected network" relies on hyper-links to propogandate and cross-reference content. I know this probably just blew your mind but hold on there's more: most internet applications aren't going to be able to discover content that isn't hyperlinked.
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The onus is on federating servers to present the information they want federated, if they do not link the hashtags then, quelle surprise, they don't get parsed by receiving servers.
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I feel like this shouldn't be rocket science but apparently I have to explain it.
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Hashtag/mention linking is one of those federation problems that nobody can agree on. Diaspora links on receive and points the links to itself - a situation I call 'tag theft'. If you try to link these on send, the links will get buggered. Most other services link on send. Facebook and Twitter also link on receive iirc - just to ensure that you can't link to something that they don't control. So we accommodate either behaviour.
I've got a preference switch for Diaspora which links on send (preventing tag theft) and uses a look-alike Unicode character rather than the standard tag or mention characters so that Diaspora doesn't bugger the tags trying to steal them.
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@mike The aforementioned 'tag theft' is about the only way to reliably cross-reference hashtags internally on the server but I don't like the idea of doing that in postActiv because then you are deliberately modifying the post that was received and if people know you're doing that, even in fairly innocuous ways, trust plummets. (See sealion.club's silly RDN fruit filter fork.)
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@mike w/r/t mentions I prefer it to display the web handle explicitly, at least the alias, for similar trust reasons. Especially since modern browsers have made it more difficult to discern where a remote link goes. Mastodon has misbehaved in this way in the past as have some of the seedier GS instances.
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@mike Not to mention we have things like accounts just named "Mike" that can make it hard to distinguish. I guess if esr changes his to eric and gets a bunch more people to make erics on other nodes we can have a genuine Eric Conspiracy going, though.
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We generally mention full names. Web handles are computer language, not human language. I'm "Mike Macgirvin" in Hubzilla. Why should I be some kind of artificial construct and attached to a server? Also with nomadic identity, it can get very confusing when several different handles on different servers can refer to the same person and the same identity.
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@mike True but that relies on people using their names which in an age of stuff like PRISM isn't probably the wisest thing.
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I don't care if you use pseudonyms - and many people do. Internally we use a long cryptographic string for identity. Tagging a long cryptographic string is even less appealing to the average person than tagging some machine-derived identity string.
Both are wrong. We're tagging people, not machine codes.
In fact I start typing @+something and I get a dropdown and select the correct person by photo and name - the name I know them by. The correct link and name is added to the post. We do what we can to translate this to other networks but there is so much variation in how others do it that this is often wrong, and if they require signed posts we basically have to forge a different message for that network than the one we provide for our own. If that network engages in tag theft, we have to strip out the correct link and let them put in some (often wrong) local link (and name). Isn't federation wonderful?
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@mike Yeah I don't know that there's what I would call an ideal solution, just increasingly shit or less shit ones. Servers that re-render the links cause all manner of wonderful problems and I have to admit I didn't consider this one and probably should have. I've had other problems when it comes to pleroma giving us misformed but at least working urls, and mastodon giving us misformed and NOT working urls. Honestly sometimes it seems to me the "gold rush" to be the new big thing in social media is progressively un-fixing a lot of problems we'd fixed, or at least patched over.
Annah
mike
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