Replied to @-mention when posting to Twitter · Issue #527 · snarfed/bridgy by Stephen Paul Weber (GitHub)

Twitter interprets microsyntax whenever you post. There's no way around it. So if you have a post whose plain text says "Blah blah with @singpolyma" there is no way to tell twitter that "@singpolyma" is not the user named "singpolyma" and it will notify said user no matter what. In a silo this works, but when bridging to a federated environment it can cause issues (and especially annoyance of Twitter users).

One way to deal with this is to have my local implementation detect any such cases and not bridge them to Twitter, but this is not ideal. What should brid.gy do if it is asked to post something with the text @singpolyma in it? Here is my proposal:

For the source HTML @singpolyma I would suggest changing it to "@ singpolyma", however I could see an argument to also leave it as-is, since some users might be writing plain-text microsyntax and expecting it is always going to Twitter? Hmm.

For the source HTML @anything put "@singpolyma" into the tweet.

For the source HTML @anything put "@ singpolyma.net" into the tweet.

Thoughts?

Not necessarily a permanent solution for all platforms and microsyntaxes depending on the number of syndicated copies, but potentially a clever stopgap for those who may need it.

One can use a zero-width space (using something like &#8203;in their HTML) between the @ and a twitter user name on the original post and the syndicated copy will not have the traditional @mention link or notification functionality.

Here’s an example

Original post:
Syndicated copy:

This reply can also serve as a test for the functionality within Github where I’ll “tag” both @kylewm and @​snarfed, but if it works, Ryan shouldn’t be auto-linked or notified.