If Bluesky post has a mention and a link, bridged Mastodon post should show link as attachment (not the mention)

[jonpincus]

My Bluesky post included both a mention and a link:

It's also the same Project Liberty that platformed anti-trans hate-monger Nancy Mace at their "Summit of the Future of the Internet" -- and then didn't take action when she made transphobic comments after @evangreer.bsky.social confronted her.

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/

And on Bluesky, it shows the attachment (as I would expect it too): https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xhrel3d6gxb2tt26u5rqo5y3/post/3ljvd3hp46k2m

But when it bridges to Mastodon, it shows the mentioned profile as the attachment: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xhrel3d6gxb2tt26u5rqo5y3/post/3ljvd3hp46k2m

[snarfed]

Hi Jon! Yes! Absolutely agreed. We've been struggling with Mastodon mention and hashtag interop for years (#887, #959, #1013, lots more). We've gotten them pretty good, but still not perfect. This is one of the remaining warts.

Specifically here, Mastodon generates those link previews, not us. We don't directly control them or choose which link to preview. Mastodon generally uses the first link, and ignores hashtags and mentions, but we still haven't reliably figured out the right HTML incantation to make it ignore @-mention links.

Honestly, at this point I'm pretty low on patience for reverse engineering Mastodon's behavior. I'm definitely still tracking this in #887, but it's not a very high priority right now.

[jonpincus]

Yeah it's definitely a hassle being quirk-for-quirk compatible with everything. This one's weird because I haven't run into similar problems from other AP implementations (at least I haven't ever noticed it), but I guess the difference is that when you're bridging a post you really do need to represent the AT-@-mention as a link ... which (given the lack of control over which link Mastodon's previewing, which i hadn't realized) quite possibly makes it unfixable. Software, smh.

[snarfed]

Sigh, yeah, nothing's ever easy. We have made gradual progress on mentions over time, but still. 🤷‍♂️ Feel free to follow #887, I'll keep tracking this there!