Long rant incoming...
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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!
Stefan Bohacek (@stefan@stefanbohacek.online)
Just a reminder that Mastodon Discovery Week starts tomorrow! With live roundtable discussions and async options, this is a great opportunity for all of us to share feedback and help make independent social media better for everyone. https://app.hi.events/event/7599/mastodon-discovery-week-2026 #mastodon #MastodonDiscoveryWeek #fediverse #SocialMedia #design #feedback
Stefan's Personal Mastodon Server (stefanbohacek.online)
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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
I'm not seeing this for reasons which you have explained.
But yeah, I understand why you're furious
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@lisamelton Hi Lisa, FWIW it looks okay to me on Ivory.
@soundclamp Thanks. Read the third part of my message.
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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
Ugh, this is annoying!
I too had my bio nicely spaced with line breaks for readability. Now the spaces are gone
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@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.
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@lisamelton Has this been on your radar? Might be worth your time!
Stefan Bohacek (@stefan@stefanbohacek.online)
Just a reminder that Mastodon Discovery Week starts tomorrow! With live roundtable discussions and async options, this is a great opportunity for all of us to share feedback and help make independent social media better for everyone. https://app.hi.events/event/7599/mastodon-discovery-week-2026 #mastodon #MastodonDiscoveryWeek #fediverse #SocialMedia #design #feedback
Stefan's Personal Mastodon Server (stefanbohacek.online)
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I'm using @ivory on iOS and iPadOS.
The web version depends on your instance, and what they choose.
My gripe with the web versions is that timestamps are differential. I don't want to know how long ago something was posted — I want to know *when* in system time format (I prefer 24-hour time).
And yes, I use emdashes. My COMM 1303 instructor was insistent that we learn how to punctuate them correctly, and they've easy using the TypWise keyboard.
@lisamelton @ivory
This is what I see on my iPhone.
If you are here to say she's doing it wrong, leave now.
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@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.
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@lisamelton Ah, that's a shame. The team would really benefit from having you included!
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@lisamelton @ivory
This is what I see on my iPhone.
If you are here to say she's doing it wrong, leave now.
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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 Accessibility hell to boot!! I hope they fix it asap, it seems such a silly choice
⁃ Person whose bio is bullet points
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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 Must be a very recent change, because the profile looks fine on infosec.exchange, which is running v4.6.0-alpha.7+glitch.
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@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.
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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@mastodon.social
fwiw it still looks correct in misskey. oh and also the renote button doesnt require you to unrenote first. -
@soundclamp Thanks. Read the third part of my message.
@lisamelton @soundclamp i adore your patience ^^ (just read the whole thread at once
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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 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.
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@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.
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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?
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@CStamp Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure it's intentional foolishness.
@lisamelton @CStamp but why..?
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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
