Long rant incoming...
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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 
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@siwek Ah. So this is CSS horkage. Great.
Well, the good news is that it's easily fixed.
@lisamelton I do hope so!
Hard to say without knowing what's exactly in the designs, but it does look accidental.
And all the paragraphs are still there, so it is indeed just css change.
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@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.
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@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.
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@lisamelton @CStamp but why..?
@noodlemaz @CStamp I take that back. It appears that i might be an error in the CSS from a cleanup pass through the stylesheet.
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@ShadSterling It appears to be a glitch introduced by a change to the CSS. Unclear whether it was intentional.
@lisamelton strikes me as related to the problem that no formatting is defined for either bios or posts, so each UI makes up its own rules, and each will misrender some posts/bios because they do conflicting things. It’s baffling that the spec doesn’t apply MIME types, especially with all the early comparisons to email. At least in this case there’s a clear fix, to restore the previous behavior
