Mastodon and HTML

Request to Mastodon instance operators: Provide a read-only anonymous HTML-only mode.

Update 2022-11-17: Mastodon supports RSS; try just tacking “.rss” onto the end of a Mastodon URL.  It doesn’t seem to work for comment threads, but it does work for main threads. For example

M-x gnus ENTER G R https://mastodon.social/@markmccaughrean.rss ENTER

will create a Gnus group containing the author’s Mastodon posts.  This is a nice workaround, though I do still hope logged-out HTML-only browsing will be possible again, post 4.x.  Thanks to the helpful people on the #mastodon IRC channel for the above suggestion.

I’ve been following some Mastodon instances for several months. In Emacs, I type:

ESCAPE x eww ENTER https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral ENTER

and, without any authentication requirement, I’m greeted with a read-only HTML view of the instance, for example:

Example toot in Mastodon v3.5.3 HTML-only mode.
Example toot in Mastodon v3.5.3 HTML-only mode.

This week I tried another instance

ESCAPE x eww ENTER https://mastodon.social/@markmccaughrean ENTER

and I am blocked by:

Mastodon v4.0.0rc1 "please enable JavaScript" message.
Mastodon v4.0.0rc1 “please enable JavaScript” message.

Is this a new default? I was surprised that read-only anonymous HTML-only mode (ala Twitter classic and Nitter) is not supported by all Mastodon instances.


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