Skip to main content


!Friendica Support If I quote-share a post coming from #Tumblr or #Diaspora on Friendica, I learnt that some platforms (Mastodon, Misskey, ...) aren't able to display this as expected. In Friendica, I see a preview image of the post, which is what I would expect:

Looking at this from Mastodon, it looks slightly less usable but at least there's still something:

On Misskey, as has been reported (can't reproduce as I don't have or want an account there), it seems the post is empty.

Hubzilla is where it looks best:


This is kind of a mess. It seems similar for Diaspoar posts. What can be done, or who's responsible to handle that right, from a standards perspective? Is there any way to be reasonably sure posts look at least usable on all federated platforms?

cc @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev)

@Kristian @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev) I guess it is up to each platform how it displays various posts, maybe.

As a side-note, in Friendica I saw that gif previews were actually played - something I never saw anywhere.
There is no really good looking way to share a post across the systems. That's why in this case we share the link to the post and rely upon the remote system to create a good preview.
@Michael Vogel @Cătă Thanks both. So I guess it's on the "other" platforms to fix that in a way, then? Not so nice. We've been discussing this out here earlier, was kind of hoping something could be fixed on the sender end of this. But seems not the case. 😔

@Aljoscha Rittner (beandev)
@Kristian
I remember that a couple of years ago Hypolite had the idea of a target detection module/layer/YouNameIt for friendica. So something that modifies friendica posts for specific targets (like mastodon) if needed, so that posts appear more in the intended way.

Basically I thought this is a good idea, but in the end they decided to not develop such for friendica.
@Rebeka Catalina Hmmm, I can understand both sides - and in a way guess the idea not to have the _server_ in charge of building dedicated formats for certain _recipients_ isn't all too bad, this might be even more a never-ending struggle to keep up with an ever-increasing amount of systems handing things slightly different. I am just a bit ... surprised to see that (again) ActivityPub apparently doesn't have a smart solution for that. @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev) suggested to use the Card Preview feature in here but apparently (as I read up on that yesterday) that's also specific to Mastodon and nothing one could expect for other implementations to work as well. 😔
@Kristian I think Friendica had all this special formats, when there was only GnuSocial, Diaspora and Hubzilla. I think when there is a link in a post then the receiver system should decide what to do with that link, if it is a Fediverse post link it could be quoted, if it is a link to picture it could be treated as such and so on. Yes it would be nice to know exactly how a post shows up on the other end, but that does not even work for text only post (see formatting or emoticons). @Aljoscha Rittner (beandev) @Rebeka Catalina
I've seen a similar issue in Friendica when looking at a Lemmy post with a link to elsewhere. Never bothered to look into it. I wonder if it's in some way related to this.