[autoexec]

When I clicked on https://mastodon.social/@danluu I got: "To use the Mastodon web application, please enable JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the native apps for Mastodon for your platform."

That's probably going to leave people with the impression that JS is required. Sure, there are desktop clients (all third party) and I could probably try those, but generally the kinds of people who'd run random code on their systems and give it network access will probably just have JS enabled by default in the first place. At least some are open source I guess.

Looking at some of the the open source projects I was amused to find a client for MS-DOS (https://github.com/SuperIlu/DOStodon) and then amused again to see all the .js files it needs to work. It looks like it might take a little work to find a desktop client that doesn't just run a bunch of javascript anyway

[justaj]

Not only is JS required, but for some reason those Mastodon pages can't be (easily?) archived in https://web.archive.org/, whereas Twitter pages can.

[hmcq6]

Archiving is an interesting issue to bring up.

Due to the federated nature of Mastodon every other instance is ostensibly an archive as there is currently no way to guarantee that a tweet/comment/account is removed from remote instances when you delete it from your local instance.

[autoexec]

What I've been doing when people here post Mastodon links to is add .rss after the @whatever bit which lets me grab their RSS feed and then I can scroll through that to try to find the post being mentioned. I'm not sure the entire post always shows up, and I think you don't get replies or comments or whatever Mastodon is supposed to have with posts, but you can at least get some kind of information out of Mastodon that way.

[ehPReth]

Try adding /embed after - sadly you don't get the replies etc (same as RSS) but it's a lot less hassle than scrolling though RSS

[DANmode]

> sadly you don't get the replies etc

So, parity to unauthenticated Twitter browsing.

[ehPReth]

It used to work, then they broke it in v4 with whatever 'upgrades' they made and haven't brought back the lost functionality yet :/.

You can add /embed on the end to see the singular post without replies, but it's not really a good substitute.

GH issues:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19953

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23153

[hardcopy]

https://mastodon.social/@danluu.rss