When posting via the macOS app, paragraphs in posts look fine when viewed in the app itself:
First paragraph
Second paragraph
but when cross-posted to Mastodon, extra empty lines appear:
First paragraph
Second paragraph
The extra lines are probably in some native apps like Ivory for iOS, right? Some Mastodon apps don’t handle HTML very well. I’ve found that usually the post looks correct in Mastodon on the web, where whitespace is properly ignored. Technically this is a bug in the native apps, but I do want to work around it in Micro.blog too in the near future.
That’s right: I first noticed the issue in Ivory on iOS, and reproduced it on Ivory for macOS.
You’re right that it looks fine in the Mastodon web UI and in the micro.blog UI when logged out, but the line breaks are removed entirely when viewing the same post on the Replies tab of the Micro.blog Mac app, or on micro.blog/account/replies.
So the same post appears 3 different ways, 2 of which are within micro.blog.
Whilst true, I’m not sure it matters too much since that view is simply a list to give you quick access for managing the posts*. If it did this once you opened the reply in the editor, or the conversation view, or even the Replies page on your blog then I’d say it’s a problem.
(* Unfortunately that’s not necessarily obvious since you access it exactly the same way you access the main timeline. It would probably be better if these sections were markedly different from the main timeline.)
Yeah, it’s not obvious but in Micro.blog essentially the top section (Timeline, Mentions, Bookmarks, Discover) is the social network part where posts should look the same everywhere, and the other section (Posts, Pages, Replies, etc.) is more like WordPress’s admin screen where you manage your own content.
Having said all that, I don’t really think Ivory is going to change their post display since it’s so rooted in a Twitter-like service that doesn’t use HTML, so I do want to improve this so it looks better in other native apps. Thanks y’all!