gotosocial/docs/user_guide/posts.md

Posts

Input Types

GoToSocial currently accepts two different types of input for posts. These are:

• plain
• markdown

Plain is the default method of posting: GtS accepts some plain looking text, and converts it into some nice HTML by parsing links and mentions etc. If you're used to Mastodon or Twitter or most other social media platforms, this way of writing posts will be immediately familiar.

Markdown is a more complex way of organizing text, which gives you more control over how your text is parsed and formatted.

For more information on markdown, see The Markdown Guide.

Formatting

When a post is submitted in plain format, GoToSocial automatically does some tidying up and formatting of the post in order to convert it to HTML, as described below.

Whitespace

Any leading or trailing whitespaces and newlines are removed from the post. So for example:

this post starts with some newlines

will become:

this post starts with some newlines

Wrapping

The whole post will be wrapped in <p></p>.

So the following text:

Hi here's a little post!

Will become:

<p>Hi here's a little post!</p>

Linebreaks

Any newlines will be replaced with <br />

So to continue the above example:

Hi here's a little post!

And here's another line.

Will become:

<p>Hi here's a little post!<br /><br />And here's another line</p>

Links

Any recognizable links in the text will be shortened and turned into proper hyperlinks, and have some additional attributes added to them.

For example:

Here's a link to something: https://example.org/some/link/address

will become:

Here's a link to something: <a href="https://example.org/some/link/address" rel="nofollow" rel="noreferrer" rel="noopener">example.org/some/link/address</a>

which will be rendered as:

Here's a link to something: example.org/some/link/address

Note that this will only work for http and https links; other schemes are not supported.

Mentions

You can 'mention' another account by referring to the account in the following way:

@some_account@example.org

In this example, some_account is the username of the account you want to mention, and example.org is the domain that hosts their account.

The mentioned account will get a notification that you've mentioned them, and be able to see the post in which they were mentioned.

Mentions are formatted in a similar way to links, so:

hi @some_account@example.org how's it going?

will become:

hi <span class="h-card"><a href="https://example.org/@some_account" class="u-url mention">@<span>some_account</span></a></span> how's it going?

which will be rendered as:

hi @some_account how's it going?

When mentioning local accounts (ie., accounts on your instance), the second part of the mention is not necessary. If there's an account with username local_account_person on your instance, you can mention them just by writing:

hey @local_account_person you're my neighbour

This will become:

hey <span class="h-card"><a href="https://my.instance.org/@local_account_person" class="u-url mention">@<span>local_account_person</span></a></span> you're my neighbour

which will be rendered as:

hey @local_account_person you're my neighbour

Input Sanitization

In order not to spread scripts, vulnerabilities, and glitchy HTML all over the place, GoToSocial performs the following types of input sanitization:

plain input type:

• Before parsing, any existing HTML is completely removed from the post body and content-warning fields.
• After parsing, all generated HTML is run through a sanitizer to remove harmful elements.

markdown input type:

• Before parsing, any existing HTML is completely removed from the content-warning field.
• Before parsing, any existing HTML in the post body is run through a sanitizer to remove harmful elements.
• After parsing, all generated HTML is run through a sanitizer to remove harmful elements.

GoToSocial uses bluemonday for HTML sanitization.