so, an old style BBS?

I’d be all in.

Because PixelFed is purposefully hiding the salad option from them. Which is what we are complaining about: it’s lying to our potential customers about us. Note that it didn’t do that before.

This is great yes and IMO how it should be done. It’s not necessary fr eg.: PixelFed to implement themself all the functionality to process forums, videos, cooking recipes, Pokémon boxes, microblogging, macroblogging, nanoblogging, femtoblogging, nanopicturing, macroboosting, etc. Just one: linking (and, well, properly announcing the link is there).

You sly dog you made me open my network tab to see if there actually was an image there! (there is, it was just being blocked because of my uBO setting for fetching remotes).

No, you as a poster in the Fediverse are selling pizzas and salads. PixelFed is “misrepresenting” you, for lack of a better word, by telling people you only sell pizzas. The thing is, it wasn’t doing that before. It was purposefully made to hide useful information that was there before. IMO there should be a sticky “this user has other content which is not images” headbar or something. Only removable as an opt-in per account followed, so that it is not possible for people to say that PF purposefully hid information.

The problem is not “you ordered a pizza yet are complaining it isn’t a salad”. The problem is you are selling pizzas and salads, but the middleman is undercutting you on the delivery of the pizzas, leaving your clients with the fake impression you sell only salads and/or provide a bad service.

All that said, from an interface design perspective the current mode is exactly how it should happen. Pixelfed and pretty much everything else are purposefully subset-specific apps. All that’s needed is the reminder (as visible as possible) that content you are looking at is incomplete and you can find the more complete version on this or that URL or app. Same principle as if I wanted to eg.: design a “hashtag explorer” for the Fediverse. I’d focus on that instead of the posts (and pictures); but what I can’t ethically do is prevent my users from discovering their existence.