blhue@jerry Hi and thank you for hosting this service. I migrated here from another instance and am having a better experience. I'm writing to ask if you know why (maybe it's intentional) when I share images or links to posts via the iOS share feature the thumbnails/summaries do not render? For other mastodon sites a nice rendition of the post shows in the Messages conversation where it's shared. Here I get a gray box that just says "infosec.exchange". Not a huge deal, but different. Thanks!
@jerry Sure! Here's a screenshot where I shared a link to two mastodon toots. The first is hosted on some other instance and the second one is a link to this thread as an example of what I mean.
@jerry I just want people to see the cat photos from infosec I share is all 😆
Jerry 🦙💝🦙@blhue I was just about to reproduce it - I will figure out what is happening and fix. I think it may be that I blocked the scraper that apple is using to build the preview and if so, I should be able to fix it
@jerry Excellent. Thanks for looking into it! Sorry for the disjointed conversation thread. I think I don't know how to properly converse on mastodon. Newb.
@blhue it should be fixed now. In a stunning revelation, rendering that preview requires a request from Apple with a user agent string of "facebookexternalhit", which I was indeed blocking, but I've removed that block and can see it working now
@jerry Strange! I block meta on my network, so don't blame you at all for having that in place! Thank you for fixing it. Thinking if the preview is in the link people not on mastodon may be more inclined to click it and then maybe join up.