I'm still uncertain how and, especially, to which extent I'll handle the increasing amount of requirements for #Mastodon toots.

The core of my problem is that I'm not even on Mastodon. You can see my posts as toots, but they don't come from Mastodon. I'm on #Hubzilla (#^https://hubzilla.org/) which is an entirely separate project from Mastodon and actually several years older than Mastodon. It's still a part of the #Fediverse, otherwise you Mastodon users out there wouldn't be able to read this.

Since these are two projects with two different backgrounds, and since Hubzilla, being older than Mastodon, wasn't developed around maximum possible Mastodon compatibility, there are issues with said compatibility.

I'm not even talking about Mastodon rejecting text formatting such as bold type, italics or underline, thereby also destroying quotes. (Does it at least accept [url=] tags?)

I'm not even talking about the effort I have to take to add alt-texts to pictures. Mastodon has a nifty point-and-click interface for that. Hubzilla requires me to edit a long string of BBcode. It's a wonder nonetheless that this works on Mastodon as well. It can get tedious, also because Hubzilla allows me to put a theoretically unlimited number of pictures into one post and not just one or three, but it's doable.

I'm not even talking about Mastodon always slapping pictures behind the end of a toot, even if you carefully put them in-between text blocks in places such as #Friendica, Hubzilla, #Zap or #Streams-based instances. (By the way: Hubzilla puts pictures ahead of the text when it displays Mastodon toots.)

But the latter brings another problem with itself: #CWs (content warnings) become largely useless on Mastodon for everything that isn't a genuine Mastodon #toot, at least if they are to hide the picture(s). Which is the case far more than often.

See, if you put a #CW on a original Mastodon toot, it hides everything, the picture included.

On Hubzilla, "CW" is called "summary", but it should do the same. In theory.

Now, if you put a summary on your Hubzilla post, Mastodon only hides the text. Not the picture. The picture will immediately show up in plain sight for everyone, right below the CW. You don't even get to choose not to scroll down to the picture because the CW eliminates the possibility to scroll, because it compresses any text into one line.

I'm not convinced that that's a bug on Hubzilla's side because Hubzilla has no influence at all upon where Mastodon puts pictures in a toot. It's more like Mastodon expecting everyone to do it its way. If Mastodon halfway re-writes any and all posts coming in from outside as it pleases, Hubzilla can't do anything about that.

At the end of the day, all I could use summaries (again, = CWs) for is just that. Summaries to hide huge walls of text. As in tl;dr. But I can't use them to hide pictures from sensitive people.

Hubzilla and Mastodon also use different ways of handling NSFW content which are incompatible. Hubzilla parses both NSFW and #NSFW and then hides the entire post, pictures and hashtags and all, behind a yellow button. If I add a summary, you have to click twice to see the post.

Mastodon puts pictures from outside Mastodon into plain sight, unblurred, regardless of any NSFW marks, and, again, only hides the text behind a CW if there is one.

So if you ask users on Friendica, Hubzilla, Zap, (streams) etc. to never post pictures that could possibly offend or trigger someone in plain sight, that's like asking them to never post pictures at all anymore.

And if you ask them to come to Mastodon instead so that their posts stay compatible with 99% of all Fediverse users, that's like demanding the shutdown of everything that isn't Mastodon. Also, we've got our reasons to use something that isn't Mastodon. And they go way beyond having more than 500 characters per post.