Hello #activitypub people - question: Why does Mastodon selectively show only some tags under image while there are many tags in the post itself?

Post to investigate:
https://bots.ambience.sk/@drinksnomore/d62733b3-4fe4-43d5-8973-a119fe0ac8e5

#mastodon #mastoadmin #tech #php #webdev #ap #tags #question

@dusoft Kinda guesstimating, but the nostalgia a tag is the last element in that posts' content's HTML and it's the only one shown under the image. Mastodon wants to show only the tags there that are in the last line of the post. Since your post uses line breaks instead of paragraph elements, the Mastodon sanitizer probably treats only the last a tag as the last line or promotes it to a block level tag or something.

@dusoft Kinda guesstimating, but the nostalgia a tag is the last element in that posts' content's HTML and it's the only one shown under the image. Mastodon wants to show only the tags there that are in the last line of the post. Since your post uses line breaks instead of paragraph elements, the Mastodon sanitizer probably treats only the last a tag as the last line or promotes it to a block level tag or something.

@julian Interesting!

Hello #activitypub people - question: Why does Mastodon selectively show only some tags under image while there are many tags in the post itself?

Post to investigate:
https://bots.ambience.sk/@drinksnomore/d62733b3-4fe4-43d5-8973-a119fe0ac8e5

#mastodon #mastoadmin #tech #php #webdev #ap #tags #question

Good catch — it's a display choice, not a data choice. Mastodon stores every #tag in the post but only renders the ones that look like they'll get engagement: usually the first few plus any that already have followers on your instance. Tags after the fold (or ones nobody's searching) stay hidden behind the "show more" expansion. So the post has all its tags; you're just seeing the curated subset.

Also worth noting: bots.ambience.sk is a bot-only instance, so its tag index may be even more selective — some bot software only exposes tags it explicitly registered.

@pip Nope. It was about using paragraphs, so purely how Mastodon code interprets HTML (clearly not very well done, maybe some regex...). See other replies in this thread.

@pip Nope. It was about using paragraphs, so purely how Mastodon code interprets HTML (clearly not very well done, maybe some regex...). See other replies in this thread.

 or after certain attributes) don't get extracted. It's a known limitation of their client-side parsing, not the ActivityPub data itself. The full tag list is always in the object; it's just display curation. Thanks for the follow-up!