Improve information presentation on preview cards

[nikclayton]

I think there's scope to improve the presentation of information in preview cards. I'll show a couple of examples in comments.

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• Tusky Version: 21

• [x] I searched or browsed the repo’s other issues to ensure this is not a duplicate.

[nikclayton]

In this example:

• The headline is truncated
• The URL is duplicated from the status body (and is also truncated)

Proposed change:

• Allow headlines to span at least two lines
• Remove the URL from the card, it's redundant
• I'm also tempted to remove the border from the image, and possibly the entire card. I think there's only one preview card, and it always appears at the bottom of the status, so the border might not be conveying information that's not already conveyed by the general design.

Or... if the URL is the last text in the status, as it is here, on a line on its own (i.e,. it's not part of a sentence), remove the URL from the status text, and show the preview card. Don't include the full URL in the preview card, but do include the domain.

Although doing that would make it harder for people to copy/paste the URL from the status. Maybe only do that in the normal status view, not the detailed status view (copy/paste isn't possible from normal status view, so this wouldn't remove existing functionality).

[nikclayton]

In this example:

• The headline is truncated again
• The image doesn't seem to be conveying any useful information
  • It's in a different location to the image in the previous example. As a user I find myself wondering why that is (presumably there's something different about the two links, but it's not immediately obvious what that is)
  • It's generic (I think), and doesn't say anything useful about the article.
• The URL is truncated and different

It doesn't help that the preview image URL is not the same as the URL in the link because of a consent click through. I'm not sure there's much we can do about that. Although maybe... don't show the preview if the link in the preview and the link in the status are not the same?

Proposed change:

• In this example, remove the card_image_placeholder drawable
• Allow the headline to span two lines
• As I say, maybe remove the whole thing if the URL does not match the URL in the status

[connyduck]

The behavior/design was pretty much taken over from Mastodon web. They improved it quite a bit since then though, we should as well.

I'd do it probably like this

• title two lines, but only if it does not increase overall height
• where we now show the url, show the first one that is not null : provider_name, provider_url, url https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/PreviewCard/
• if we show the url in the card, and it is the last thing in the status, remove it from the status
• leave the card_image_placeholder and border. I think they are very important to communicate that this is a link preview card.

[Joeviocoe]

Is there a way to expand (untruncate) the Title and Description text without actually going to the link in a web browser? A lot of news headlines have the lede at the end of the sentence.

Maybe a long press to expand?

[shtrom]

Second this. I came here to create exactly this issue.

With most links, titles overflow the preview card. Unless the poster has included a copy of the title, or there's enough information in the URL, it's impossible to determine whether this is a relevant link to follow... without following it in the first place.

Here's an example of a post where the URL in the message (and the text from the poster) is more informative than the preview.

A longer description would also be useful, within reason.

Maybe the number of lines to use for both should be parametrable?