They Hate Us for Our Links

While working on Project Bracer Phoenix I have been digging into how various social media platforms handle rich text posts, specifically how they handle embedded links (i.e., links where there is some text to click on, instead of the raw URL). Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of the current crop of social media platforms (Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky) handle rich text or links in a truly satisfactory manner. Of these, Twitter and Threads have absolutely no support, instead providing a single link preview. Bluesky does support embedded links, but they use their own format rather than plain ol' HTML and Mastodon will accept a subset of HTML from other ActivityPub servers, but not through its own API and its own clients (even though the API examples show HTML posts). Links with text anchors are a fundamental building block of the web, and social media platforms (even the relatively good ones) are actively hostile to them. These platforms are bad citizens of the web, and they hate us for our links.

None of this is new. Back in 2019, Anil Dash observed that the popular "link in bio" idiom for Instagram was a slow knife, simultaneously constraining our ability to link and lowering our expectations of web-based platforms. Robb Knight reminded me that services like Linktree only because platforms are link-averse. Commercial social media platforms have a vested interest in not supporting links, especially links to places outside the platform. As Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram puts it, the value of these platforms is "reach and engagement" (not connection, or information, or education), and you can't get your users to "engage" if they are following links to elsewhere. But it is especially annoying that platforms that want to be different and better are also falling into this same trap (looking at you, Mastodon). I personally consider Mastodon's lack of proper HTML support to be one of its original sins, and Bluesky seemingly wants to be different just for the sake of being different.

All of this has been swirling in my head for a while now, espcially after Jim Nielsen reminded me that links are powerful. But what prompted me to actually sit down and write this was discovering Eric Bailey's post "Websites are like bridges". This seems particularly apropos because the primary function of a bridge is to take you somewhere else, and a good website more often than not, takes you somewhere else (via, you guessed it, a link). Remember when we used to talk about "browsing" or "surfing" the web, verbs that imply swiftly and easily moving from one place to the next?

So, gripes and rage baiting aside, where does one go from here? Well, one of the benefits of coming back to my own website is that I can freely have as many links, with whatever text, wherever I like. One of my drivers for building a working writing and publishing system (for both short and medium form) was to be able to write with rich styling and lots of links. Project Bracer Phoenix is an effort to smooth over the deficiencies of the various platforms, and will hopefully be one of a number of tools I build to make writing and disseminating text-centric material easier (i.e., textcasting).

A glimmer of hope in this whole sordid situation is that everyone's free to write websites, and it's never been easier. The beauty of being on the web itself (as opposed to a siloed platform) is that one size doesn't have to fit all. You can be at whatever level of technical detail you choose, with options ranging from rolling your own HTML and running your own server, to using a static site generator, all the way to content-management systems like WordPress and Medium, and including quirkier options in the middle like omg.lol, Pika, or Blot. If you do decide to go down one of these routes, come join us at 32-bit Café, a new community for fellow web-heads.

Happy hacking and good blogging!