@zotheca @Stefan Bohacek It isn't the title field. It's the summary field. It has been the summary field since Evan Prodromou added it to Identi.ca in 2008. And it only became a CW field when a Mastodon user for the demo scene submitted a merge request to Mastodon's GitHub repository in 2017 which repurposed this summary field, unused by Mastodon at this point, as a CW field.

My own POV on this is a whole lot different from typical Mastodon POVs. I've joined the Fediverse on Friendica in the early 2010s as opposed to on Mastodon in the 2020s before I moved on to fledgling Hubzilla.

Now, both Friendica and Hubzilla as well as the whole rest of the family (of which (streams) of 2021 and Forte of 2024 still exist) have a nifty optional feature called "NSFW": It's a list of keywords which, if detected in a message, hide the entire message behind a button. Much like the hiding feature in Mastodon's filters, only not built into the actual filters, much more simple and over 12 years older than Mastodon's solution.

In this software family, the NSFW feature is not perceived as a filter, even though it's very similar to the actual channel-wide filters (which, by the way, are among the few things which are more simple even on Hubzilla than on Mastodon because they've only got two keyword lists, an allowlist and a blocklist).

Rather, it's seen as an automated, individual, reader-side CW generator. It's deeply engrained into the culture of these Fediverse server applications which is a great deal different from Mastodon's culture. And it's seen as vastly superior to poster-side CWs that are forced upon all readers all the same.

A takeaway from this software family: If you write a potentially sensitive post, and you have no way of artificially weaving NSFW-triggering keywords into the actual post text, add them to the bottom line as hashtags. I do that all the time, hence the hashtags that start with "CW" to make clear that they're supposed to trigger reader-side CW generators.

By the way, the Friendica and Hubzilla inventor and (streams) developer Mike Macgirvin proposed two catch-all hashtags for sensitive posts to the (streams) users (that was before he forked Forte off the streams repository). One is #sensitive which also has the side-effect that (streams) and potentially also Forte make Mastodon blank out all images in the post. The other one is #⚠️. Or, if your post is really disturbing, #⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️. However, this has yet to find its way into Hubzilla, not to mention Friendica or even Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse.

As for the summary field, if Mastodon actually managed to push its entire community away from fixed poster-side CWs towards automated reader-side CWs, the whole field would be useless. I mean, Mastodon didn't support it at all before it had a CW field because, frankly, you don't need summaries for 500 characters.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #CW #CWs #CWMeta #ContentWarning #ContentWarnings #ContentWarningMeta #Hashtag #Hashtags #HashtagMeta #CWHashtagMeta #Filter #Filters #Mastodon #MastodonCulture #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #Forte