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
You all know I'm trans. So, I care a LOT about presentation, about how I look and how I'm perceived.
In a medium that is primarily text-based, I would think it's important to preserve the manner in which the author's text is formatted. ESPECIALLY WHEN THAT AUTHOR IS DESCRIBING THEMSELVES!
Look, I might as well just change the BIO text field to:
"See https://lisamelton.net/about/ because Mastodon constrains self expression"
Am I upset about this issue? Yes! Aren't you?
2/3
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
I am not seeing what problem it was intended to fix.
Just encountered another problem. Not the first time.
AWI mode. Edit post to append an emoji. Post is small.
Lisa Melton
siwek
SpaceLifeForm