Mastodon links broken

submitted 9 months ago by

edited 8 months ago

When I put Mastodon URLs in this post, they look fine on preview but are broken once published. First I just pasted them as plain URLs, then I tried enclosing them in markdown code, neither works.

https://piefed.social/post/1048252

https://ohai.social/@Taweret@timeloop.cafe/114864345876664743

https://ohai.social/@miru@social.miyaku.media/114859196162855393

End up looking like this:

    @Taweret@timeloop.cafe/114864345876664743" rel="nofollow ugc" target="_blank">@Taweret  

    @miru@social.miyaku.media/114859196162855393" rel="nofollow ugc" target="_blank">@Miru

EDIT: even trying to post them in code blocks here, they end up messed up.

Here's an image of the markdown:

Hot Top New Old

wjs018@piefed.social

Contributor 8 months ago

Ok, I was able to figure out what is happening. Basically, the way that mentions work is that the software looks for things that look like @ something @ something_else (broken up so you can see it) and assume that this is a user being mentioned. That pattern is found in the mastodon links you included and it's messing up the formatting.

Thanks for pointing out another issue with the markdown_to_html function!

@rimu@piefed.social I believe the issue is here in send_post, but I don't have an easy idea for a solution. My regex skills are awful, but if we could detect that the pattern was already part of a url, maybe ignore the mention bit? Or can do the mention without messing up the formatting of the existing <a> tag?

Rimu@piefed.social

PieFed dev 8 months ago

Something like that.

See how in the post above, the links go to https://piefed.social/user/lookup/miru/social.miyaku.media

We have some code that turns @rimu@piefed.social into a link to piefed.social/u/rimu via /user/lookup and that is running amok.

The stuff in send_post is likely another similar problem - that is the function which notifies people when they are mentioned in a post, which will be broken too.

Rimu@piefed.social

PieFed dev 8 months ago

When it comes to regex I'm pretty hopeless. https://regex101.com/ can help a lot though.

klu9@piefed.social

OP 8 months ago

@rimu@piefed.social & @wjs018@piefed.social

Thanks for looking into this.

In the meantime, is there a Fediverse / non-corporate URL redirector/shortener I could use to turn the Mastodon URLs into working links?

(I found fedv.link but that appears to include all the original URL, which would presumably result in the same problem happening.)

wjs018@piefed.social

Contributor 8 months ago

I don't know of any other than generic link shorteners off the top of my head (bitly, tinyurl, etc.). However, I have a fix almost done, so it should be <24 hours before this is taken care of. There are just a couple edge cases I need to write tests for.